Napoleon's Nightingale
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Aug 11, 2005
- Messages
- 1,670
- Reaction score
- 17
- Location
- Ohio
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Undisclosed
zk655 said:What was the genetic make up of the parents? Did the parents display the mutation, or were they just carriers? Did all resulting offspring of the 2nd generation display this trait? How many offspring made up each of the successive generations? Did any of them have the trait?
"In the experiment, the Purdue researchers found that in 10% of watercress plants with two copies of a mutant gene called "hothead" didn't always blossom with deformed flowers like their parents, which carried the mutant genes. Instead, those plants had normal white flowers like their grandparents, which didn't carry the hothead gene and the deformity appeared only for a single generation.
The normal watercress plants with hothead genes appear to have kept a copy of the genetic coding from the grandparent plants and used it as a template to grow normally.
However, Pruitt's team didn't find the template in the plants' DNA or chromosomes where genetic information is stored and they did not determine whether a particular gene is encoded to carry out the recovery of the normal DNA."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/genetics/2005-03-23-plant-evolution_x.htm
http://www.agriculture.purdue.edu/agcomm/agnews/public/story.asp?newsid=1114
zk655 said:Regardless: I don't really see how this provides a "stopper" for evolution. In reality it shows that organisms undergo change, and are not tied down to a fixed "perfect design".
If the gene exists in animals and humans it would mean that the mutations would begin to die out by the 3rd generation meaning that the mutated animals would not pass on the mutation and would not evolve further.