Re: Book review: The Plausibility of Life (Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart) (CORRECTED VERSION PLEASE!)


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More W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart

THE PLAUSIBILITY OF LIFE

Resolving Darwin's dilemma

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Book review by Anthony Campbell. The review is licensed under a Creative
Commons License.
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One of the most surprising things about evolutionary biology is the
extent to which what the authors call "core processes" have been
conserved from the earliest times - in fact, probably from the
pre-Cambrian. As an example, more than 50% of the metabolic enzymes in
the bacterium E.coli are identical to those in humans.

I'm not a geneticist, although I have studied genetics at the graduate
level. My question is this: Could genes for metabolic enzymes be
accidentally transferred from one organism's cell to another (or embryo in
higher animals) by infection of a retrovirus? Given the vastness of the
timescale involved, surely many such things could happen. We use the
process ourselves to manipulate genes in the lab, so is it not plausible
that successful genes from one organism could find their way into other
organisms that would readily gain a survival advantage, and incorporate them
into their own genomes?

Another way to account for the 50% similarity of metabolic genes could be
that there is only "one good way" to make such genes, therefore they
eventually appear as identical genes through parallel development in many
different evolutionary lines.

Any traction in either of these hypotheses?


.

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