Coelacanth Genome Sequenced 82
damn_registrars writes "The lobe-finned fish described as a 'living fossil' due to its apparent lack of change for hundreds of millions of years (thought to be extinct until the 1930s) has been sequenced by an international team, including scientists from Sweden, Harvard, and MIT. The 3-billion-base-pair genome of the Coelacanth was described yesterday in the journal Nature. This paper is published in an open (non-paywalled) manner on Nature, making the full text available to all. 'We found that the genes overall are evolving significantly slower than in every other fish and land vertebrate that we looked at.'"
Re:Why Evolve (Score:3, Insightful)
But why would natural selection lead to significant evolutionary diversification if maintaining the status quo is closest to the optimal solution? In that case, wouldn't selection work to keep things more of the same? I'd suspect those fish probably aren't alone in being "genetically old", there are likely some insects and creatures like jellyfish that really haven't evolved much since some wormlike thing had the luck to spawn the first vertebrate. Thus plenty of critters we have now aren't really all that much different than the ones the dinosaurs were living with.