DNA of Woolly Mammoth Fully Sequenced 175
jd writes "Scientists have decoded the mitochondrial DNA of the Woolly Mammoth. According to the article: 'the Mammoth was most closely related to the Asian elephant rather than the African Elephant. The three groups split from a common ancestor about six million years ago, with Asian elephants and mammoths diverging about half a million years later.' This work is tied into efforts by researchers to use DNA to analyze other extinct species, such as the cave bear, the Haast eagle and the American lion. The novel aspect of this latest work is that it involved stitching together almost 50 fragments of mtDNA in order to obtain the sequence as a whole."
Mitochondrial DNA! (Score:5, Informative)
Come on folks, this is junior high biology.....
Incorrect title (again) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mitochondrial DNA! (Score:2, Informative)
I think I saw an article a couple days ago postulating on resurrecting a Wolly Mammoth based on the mtDNA sequencing...
Re:Can Jurrasic Park be a reality... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I'm pretty sure they used frogs for some stupid reason.
Re:How many bytes... (Score:2, Informative)
You can download [gutenberg.org] The human genome project files from project gutenberg and see for yourself.
Re:Mammoths evolve? wait a sec... (Score:3, Informative)
Micro-evolution, hybrids etc are all considered perfectly valid by IDers.
Re:When can we bring them back from extinction? (Score:3, Informative)
It would be nice, however, to let maggie [alaskazoo.org] go someplace warmer, and have something more suitable to our colder Alaskan climate. They might be tasty, and one sure would fill the deep freeze with meat for the winter.
Alaskan man dies of autoerotic asphyxiation among 1,000 marijuana plants worth $2,000,000 [suvalleynews.com]
Re:Mammoths evolve? wait a sec... (Score:3, Informative)
There are various criteria by which you can judge what constitutes a species, and to be honest it does get slightly woolly round the edges, but one good rule of thumb is that if two animals can mate to produce fertile offspring, they're both of the same species. A horse and a donkey can produce a mule, which is infertile. Likewise, these two squirrels cannot produce fertile offspring. Therefore it could be argued that by this measure, they are two different species, even though at first glance they look exactly the same. Come back in, I dunno, fifty thousand years, and they might look or behave very different from one another, which presumably would make it easier for the more simple-minded to claim that they're two different species (and doubtless that they always were).
Of course, if they've no reason to chance appearance, why should they? on the other hand, things can happen the other way - some external factor puts enough pressure on a local group of animals to cause a significant change in a short space of time. I remember seeing in a documentary some mice who lived in and around freezers, and had developed shaggy coats and stronger teeth to bite through the frozen food. Natural selection in action, baby. Now, this has to have happened very quickly indeed, and it may follow that they will eventually become a separate species. Who knows?
Anyway, point is, this stuff happens in different ways, the definition of a species is sometimes a slightly subjective thing, and idiot creationists will use this fuzziness to try to claim that it what they call macroevolution doesn't happen at all, and that science has got it all wrong, and so on. It's just sophistry aimed at simpletons.
Re:Mammoths evolve? wait a sec... (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently for them, a journey of a thousand miles does not start with a single step. It can only be achieved by some kind of magician with a pair of seven-league boots.
Justin.
Re:Well unfortunatly (Score:3, Informative)
Please do not associate creationism and ID with Christianity. Only a small fundamentalist sect of Christianity believes in such things. The vast majority of Christians throughout the world do not believe in such nonsense.
Such a misleading headline ... (Score:4, Informative)
So the headline was almost totally incorrect and misleading. The mtDNA is typically about 0.1% of a mammal's total DNA. Sequencing the mtDNA is only about 1000th of "fully sequenced". They have a long, long way to go before a "fully sequenced" claim can be made.
Their achievement is newsworthy enough by itself. There's no reason to exaggerate it so wildly.
Re:Mammoths evolve? wait a sec... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, this might not be a transitional state. It could be a long-term stable state. If conditions vary continuously across a species' range, local populations could all be well adapted to local conditions. Widely-separated populations could be very different, while they are all very similar to adjacent populations.
There isn't really a standard name for this phenomenon, though I've seen the term "range species" coined to describe it. Most of the known examples live along a seashore, or have a range that is long and narrow for some other reason.
There are also special cases, such as the domestic dog, which can interbreed with gray wolves and jackals, but the wolves and jackals produce either infertile or no offspring. But such cases are more likely incomplete speciation events.
Another confusing example is typified by lions and tigers. They can interbreed, but usually male offspring are sterile while female offspring are fertile. They are separate in the wild mostly because their ranges don't overlap. Google for "tion" and "liger" for more information.
Anyway, biologists generally accept that "species" can't really be defined precisely, and all sorts of borderline cases are seen in nature. The creationist/ID crowd makes a fuss over it, but it's not much of a problem for anyone else. You just have to accept that nature doesn't need to obey the human desire for terminology or dichotomies.
The term "species" is useful for scientific purposes, but it's not an exact match for what happens in nature. Breeding happens between individuals, while "species" is an emergent property of populations.