Does Neo-Darwinian evolution require change ?

One of the more recent papers on this, that actually directly compared parental and offspring whole genomes, estimated 70 de novo mutations (Roach et al., 2010). This is in fact lower than most previous estimates of human mutation rates so if anything Slevesque's 50 is probably a rather conservative estimate.The second part about the effect of the mutations is much more contentious.TTFN,WK

This is a great point and I linked a few months back to a post from the Pleiotropy blog which had a video showing this in a static fitness landscape and which emphasised that deleterious mutations can in fact be enabling mutations making the jumping or tunelling between local optima more likely.TTFN,WK

I know that talking nonsense about the ENCODE data is the latest thing in ID/creationism but can't you at least try to make it sound a bit less insane. Being rarely transcribed does not confer meaningful functionality on a genetic sequence. As deep sequencing technologies improve it is unsurprising that we see an increase both in the signal and the noise of the bioinformatic data sets we have.To leap from discovering a few transcripts of unannotated genetic regions to assuming that the whole genome is more than 100% functional shows a complete disconnection not just from molecular genetics but from reality itself.You were wrong when you were spouting this rubbish in March (Message 24) and you haven't got any righter since.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.Edited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

Oh really? Do you have any clue what you are talking about? Kimura was principally talking about protein evolution, i.e. that portion of the genome that is already accepted as having biologically relevant function. Once again you conflate transcriptional activity with biologically relevant function, exactly the same thing half a dozen people just called you out on and you made wounded noises about having been misunderstood over.Have you never heard of synonymous mutations? Do you not understand third base wobble? Even going by just this one phenomenon you can mutate ~30% of a protein coding gene without changing a single amino acid in the resultant protein.That is before you even touch upon the fact that many amino acids can functionally substitute for one another and that in many instances almost any amino acid will do as long as it has the correct level of hydrophobicity.What you say just highlights, once again, that you don't understand what you are talking about.TTFN,WK

Mattick is right in terms of the potential role of non-coding RNAs in development and evolution. He is wrong to try and characterise there having been a 'failure to recognise the implications of the non-coding DNA'. For a start that 50 years should only be about 20 since people were putting forward functions for non-coding DNA by the late 70's and by the early 90's there were several well established cases of regulatory non-coding RNAs in yeast and C. elegans.The real thing holding back the realisation of the extent of the role of non-coding RNAs was not any sort of preconceived dogma but technology. Without reliable highly sensitive sequencing technologies and whole genomes to work with I'm not sure how Mattick thinks these things could have been readily identified.So seriously? A gap of ~20 years from the discovery of the structure of DNA to the beginning of appreciation for the role of non-coding RNAs? If that is the biggest mistake in the history of molecular biology then molecular biology is doing pretty damn well.Mattick also extrapolates well beyond the evidence in his claims for the extent of RNA based mechanisms, and his suggestion that virtually the whole of the non-coding genome is functional is simply unsupported.TTFN,WK

I think Shadow71's exact quotes came from Mattick's home page at The University of Queensland, but a pubmed search for Mattick JS will bring up several relevant papers.I think people are throwing a lot of unwarranted ad hom attacks at Mattick. He has a perfectly creditable research record and I think Dr. A's criticisms are pretty weak. What he mean's by "The extent of non-protein-coding DNA, traditionally thought to be junk, increases with increasing complexity" is that the proportion of the genome that is non-coding tends to increase with apparent morphological complexity (Amaral and Mattick, 2008).I agree that "Most genetic information is transacted by proteins" is not as clear however, although I would suggest that if we subsitituted 'regulation' for 'information' we would be pretty close to his meaning. I think he uses information to broaden the scope to all functional activity encoded in the genome and to interactions between the genome and the environment (Mattick, 2009)I feel that like Lynn Margulis he just tends to over-emphasise the importance of his particular hobby horse, although to be fair he has a better case than Margulis as the full extent of the regulatory role of non-coding regions has yet to be established but probably will be in the foreseeable future. It just seems to me that Mattick is taking the very highest extents of those estimates to be the true level.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.