Rapid human evolution? delete DNA (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, March 11, 2011, 17:20 (5006 days ago) @ David Turell


> Latest discoveries in evolution showing deletion of non-coding segments of DNA evolved humans away from other primates. Regulators of genes are removed for this to occur.
> 
> http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-dna-human.html-In all the major science blogs I follow this is the story of the week. The article in Nature has been widely accepted as a carefully done, elegent study. The researchers were able to show that deletion of long segments of modifying DNA, that is, non-gene segments that controlled gene expression, possitively or negatively, enhanced human development from the common primate ancestor of six million years ago. Thus mutations may make changes, as originally proposed by Neo-Darwinism, but a deletion in the so-called 'junk DNA' can also accomplish major changes, perhaps more rapidly than mutations can. Most mutations are deleterious, some neutral and a few are helpful. Using mutations alone reasonably might take much longer than six million years. Whatever mechanism caused the deletions to occur, they seemed to have speeded the evolutionary developments that were identified: genital and neural/ brain. Wow! Lose DNA and get a much bigger brain!