On Transitional Species (SUMMATION MESSAGES ONLY)

Another case of creationist super-macro-evolution I guess. Ape to human in 5-7 million years, no way, Rat to bat in a few thousand years, no problem.Just out of interest where were all the birds that the sky was so empty?TTFN,WK

That's some pretty confusing formatting you've got there.TTFN,WK

It is worth emphasising the difference between similarities in protein sequence and in genetic sequence. There were 2 key papers on this subject in the same 2010 issue of Current Biology (Liu et al., 2010; Li et al, 2010). In both papers they principally focus on protein sequence, and find convergence. However when the same analysis is performed using the underlying genetic sequence the convergence is lost. In fact even just including another echo-locating cetacean, the sperm whale, reorders the trees to what would be expected rather than grouping the bats and dolphins together.You can extract an anomalous tree from the DNA sequence, but only if you focus on mutations generating non-synonymous substititions.The gene is certainly not 'virtually identical' even in the 'functional parts' of the 744 amino acid long protein. In comparisons between 14 species of bat and 4 dolphin species they only found 14 convergent amino acid sites, and these conserved sites were distributed amongst the various species.TTFN,WK

And this is why one shouldn't get one's information on biology from the news. As has already been mentioned the gene in question, prestin, is involved in cochlear development and mutations in it can affect frequency sensitivity. What bats and dolphins share is some amino acid substitutions that give them a higher sensitivity to high frequency sounds. As has been pointed out, the systems by which the sounds are produced are vastly different between bats and dolphins.TTFN,WK

No it isn't, the genetic scores are not closer for the dolphins and bats, unless you employ some highly selective criteria. They are closer if you look at scores for amino acid identity or only the DNA representing non-synonymous substitutions.What they actually show is that you can have functionally similar proteins from quite divergent DNA sequences, although certain specific residues may be constrained. So quite the opposite of your point in fact. None of that is supported at all by this example.TTFN,WK

No, it is your own lack of respect for the truth that lets you do that. Perhaps what you meant is that the press reports give you an excuse to just make up whatever word salad of creationist nonsense happens to froth out of your fingers onto the keyboard and then pretend it has some scientific support.TTFN,WK