Quote:
Originally Posted by finalgrunt
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They do not. They have a common ancestor, and they branched at one point. For the same reason we can't say that Man descends from monkeys. We shared a common ancestor, branched over a very long period of time and evolved seperatly.
So the questions which remain to solve are:
- Do all species descend from the same unicellular ancestor? If so did other different kinds exist but did not survive our ancestor? How many times did life start and vanished before it stuck to the Earth?
- How such material were formed? This is still an ongoing research field, even though we're starting to have a better picture.
For the same reason people were unable (and in some cases still are) unable to explain how we can grow from a single cell with so much differentiation, it will take time to understand the mechanisms. And unlike living cells that we can study at will, we don't have any material to study for our origins. DNA don't survive well through time, and that's the reason why we may see one day Mammoths again, but dinosaurs not so much (until we can actually write DNA code and simulate its output, and then we can build something matching our imagination, which may come close but never will be the reality).
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They do. The grey wolf is the common ancestor from which all dogs descend. The difference is that wolves are still around, and haven't changed all that much since. The proper analogy for the evolutionary timeline is monkeys are man's 'cousins' while wolves are dogs' 'parents'.
We can actually write DNA code and simulate its output. It's one of the defining technologies of this century, but it's hardly new. Costs are relatively high, ~0.35 dollars per base, meaning you can synthesize your typical gene for ~$300-500 bucks.
http://www.jcvi.org/cms/press/press-...te-researcher/
In 2010, Venter and his team synthesized a small (>1mil bases) bacterial genome. They could write in whichever code they wanted, but to ensure it was viable they stuck with something mostly natural. They did sign their names in and left a message, but otherwise it was the natural organism's genome built chemically in a lab. They then removed the DNA from a similar but different organism, and stuck their synthetic DNA inside the empty cell. The remaining cellular machinery began to read the genome, and this is now a stable cell line.
Now the key is to better understand what to write and to advance each stage of this technology to build larger genomes and to get them inside cells.