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shadowfyr · 06-10-2005, 06:42 PM

Almost forgot this discussion was going on, but this should be a fun addition:

Seems that for flies, a 'single' gene can cause a female fly court other females, i.e. turn them gay. This will no doubt bring cries of protest about a) humans not being flies, b) humans being more complex and c) no evidence of a similar gene being found in people. Well...

a) True, but lots of genes from more primitive species are used to track down ones in people. Simple = easier to find, since you don't have to sort through millions to find a gene, just thousands or even hundreds.

b) Yes, but since when does more complex mean 'less likely to break'? Ask you car mechanic which he would prefer to fix, from a purely mechanical complexity standpoint, a modern electronic fuel injection engine or a single sprocket bicycle. All that more complete means is that more than one gene may be involved and the range of differences more complex, not that their are not genes that can have the same dramatic impact.

c) So what? You have to know what you are looking for to find it. Before now the attempts to do so involved taking a lot of people, spending months processing gene sequences, and pretty much looking randomly it a few select sections of literally millions of gene pairs, hoping to find some single odd difference between 'normal', 'bi' and 'straight' people. This is like having a third party randomly search fifty nearly identical beaches, looking for a single lost ear ring, while having no clue where on the 500 yards of beach it was even lost. Digging up the entire beach to sift it is no more practical than it was to find such a gene by sifting the entire code of the human genome, only maybe 10% of which we know the function of. We have mapped all of it, but **not** actually identified what most of it does. This in fact is one of the misnomers of science. Just as its a myth that we only use 10% of hour brains 'at all', what biologists call 'junk DNA' is actually only junk in the sense that they have no idea what it does yet, so it junk with reguard to doing their own speciifc research.

06-10-2005, 06:42 PM	#116
shadowfyr Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2002 Posts: 310	Almost forgot this discussion was going on, but this should be a fun addition: Seems that for flies, a 'single' gene can cause a female fly court other females, i.e. turn them gay. This will no doubt bring cries of protest about a) humans not being flies, b) humans being more complex and c) no evidence of a similar gene being found in people. Well... a) True, but lots of genes from more primitive species are used to track down ones in people. Simple = easier to find, since you don't have to sort through millions to find a gene, just thousands or even hundreds. b) Yes, but since when does more complex mean 'less likely to break'? Ask you car mechanic which he would prefer to fix, from a purely mechanical complexity standpoint, a modern electronic fuel injection engine or a single sprocket bicycle. All that more complete means is that more than one gene may be involved and the range of differences more complex, not that their are not genes that can have the same dramatic impact. c) So what? You have to know what you are looking for to find it. Before now the attempts to do so involved taking a lot of people, spending months processing gene sequences, and pretty much looking randomly it a few select sections of literally millions of gene pairs, hoping to find some single odd difference between 'normal', 'bi' and 'straight' people. This is like having a third party randomly search fifty nearly identical beaches, looking for a single lost ear ring, while having no clue where on the 500 yards of beach it was even lost. Digging up the entire beach to sift it is no more practical than it was to find such a gene by sifting the entire code of the human genome, only maybe 10% of which we know the function of. We have mapped all of it, but not actually identified what most of it does. This in fact is one of the misnomers of science. Just as its a myth that we only use 10% of hour brains 'at all', what biologists call 'junk DNA' is actually only junk in the sense that they have no idea what it does yet, so it junk with reguard to doing their own speciifc research.