Scientists find sea sponges share human genes

[Admin Khan]

Mankind may be descended from apes but Australian scientists have found proof of links much closer to the sea floor, with a study revealing that sea sponges share almost 70 percent of human genes.
Genetic sequencing of sea sponges from the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef showed the ancient marine animal shared many of its genes with humans, including a large number typically associated with disease and cancer.
Lead researcher Bernard Degnan, of the University of Queensland, said the findings "would shed light on a whole range of different things," and could lay the foundation for breakthroughs in cancer and stem cell research.
"Sponges have what's (considered) the 'Holy Grail' of stem cells," Degnan told AFP.
Exploring the genetic function of sponge stem cells could provide "deep and important connections" to the genes that influenced human stem cell biology, he said.
"(It) might actually inform the way we think about our own stem cells and how we might be able to use them in future medical applications," he said.
The study -- published in the journal "Nature" this week -- is the result of more than five years of research by an international team of scientists.


Scientists find sea sponges share human genes

[Levanaye Zalmaye]

This further points to the direction of what the scientists have already established, with reason and evidence - that our earliest "advanced/complex" ancestors were sea-dwellers. It's fascinating that even after a few billion years, our cousins from whom we have descended are thriving in their "primordial" environment.

[Levanaye Zalmaye]

If anything, this reaffirms the validity of his scientific findings.

[PFgulalai]

Levanaye Zalmaye could this also contradict Darwins theory?

Jasmine this does not contradict Darwin's Theory of Evolution. It's true that the respectable Charles Darwin did not know about the "genes as determining factors of the biological traits" of species, he still pointed at the role of some "underlying COMMON mechanism" which governs the Natural Selection and species evolution. This was later extended by the respectable Gregor Mendel, Father of Classical Genetics, who with his numerous Pea plant studies declared the presence of some "hidden factors". The modern scientists developed tools and sequenced genomes and it hurt the BIG EGO of humans when we found that genetically we are closely similar to mouse and apes and significantly similar to Arabidopsis Thaliana (an angiospermic plant), Caenorhabditis elegans (round worm), Hydra (a fresh water coelentrate), Rana tigrina (common frog),Drosophila melanogaster,etc. The genomic similarity to sponges should not be surprising now (we are pretty convinced that we are similar to all organism but with varied degree): we (as humans) had great setbacks in early years of 2000s with the first draft of Human Genome which shocked the hell out of us, by showing that although we have evolved as highly complex mammals yet the number of genes in human genomes are lesser than Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly).

Here is a synopsis of the salient features of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, that I made in some other thread:
http://www.pashtunforums.com/91597-post29.html

I would recommend reading "The Selfish Gene" and "The Greatest Show on Earth: The evidence of Evolution" by Richard Dawkins. These two books have reformulated Darwin's theory of evolution by keeping the basic framework of his theory but revised it from the perspective of modern science.

Peace.

P.S. Although your question was to LZ, I did not mind spending some minutes to answer it :-)

[Millatpal Noorzai]

My anticipation of SPONGE BOB wasn't wrong

[PFgulalai]

Gulalai how accurate is his theory I have read many people have said his theory hokds no weight but what makes the most senae to you? Creationism?

(below are my responses to almost similar question asked somewhere ekse on the forum)

Modern science has validated Darwin's theory of Evolution through 200 years of rigorous research.Today Darwin theory of Natural Selection is cosidered the "sacred" text in the scientific community. It is simply astonishing to know that what Darwin predicted ~200 years ago has been confirmed through high-throughput sequencing technology. His wisdom and genius called for investigating the process of evolution.

Darwin was not the first one to talk about evolution. Many attempts were made by Greek,Chinese,persian philosophers at different times. With the dawn of 18th century when the science of biology was advancing, many others such as E.Darwin and Lamarck also talked about the changes in the species at the organismic level. All these were rejected until both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel came with an almost similar idea (natural selection) and subsequent publication of his famous paper in the Journal Nature. Since Darwin thoery elaborated natural selection with strong evidence (his adventures on islands with finches) it started attracting wide attention from the scientific community.

Creationism does not make any sense to me, not even the theistic evolution, which I consider not less than a sophisticated fascade of theistic creationism. If you believe that a supernatural being such as god has been instrumental in evolving the humans, then it is pretty unreasonable to make a claim that Adam was introduced at some point in the evolutionary timeline when the world was already made a convenient place for him as some of the proponents of theistic evolution would claim. As such, natural selection is not compatible even with theistic evolution because both have entirely different principles of operation.

All theories are open to falsification. But the difference between the creationism and evolution is that where the former is absolute, the latter is open to discussion and hence by virtue of logic, is more plausible. It is very easy to invalidate Creationism in that it does not provide any factual evidence and rely on the supernatural powers of an abstract entity. A scientific theory, on the other hand, passes through the process of logic and reasoning (hypothesis, observation, experimentation, results, conlusion). As such, the theory of evolution is not a fairy tale but so far a more logical approach to the question of origin of life and evolution of species.

The theory has been validated as 235,740 scientific publications in PUBMED (www.ncbi.nlm.nig.gov), the online repository of medical/bio publications, used the term "evolution". Recently the pharma companies have pumping huge sums of money to fund research for investigating the evolution of Antibiotic resistance as depicted by the resistance to Penicillins, tetracyclines, chloromphenicol etc by Bacteria, which was not the case few decades ago.

[pukhtana]

Gulalai your intelligence makes me happy.

[PFgulalai]

Gulalai your intelligence makes me happy.

Your happiness makes me