Excuse me while I sequence this genome Was Re: tree-climbing hominid
Bill Burnett (bbur@wpo.nerc.ac.uk)
Tue, 17 Oct 1995 09:55:31
(H. M. Hubey) writes:
>So what? The wheel is still spinning. LIke all theories it
>also has to take into account other developments and new
>finds. The best thing to hope for now would be more advances
>in DNA mapping (for all animals). That's probably not too
>far away. The rate of increase of computing power will put
>a supercomputer (of around 1990) on a desktop by 2000. Soon after
>that tremendous computation power will be available on small
>machines that can be put in small research labs and thousands
>of people will be working on these problems. It shouldn't take
>too long now.
Wait, wait, I didn't realise I could generate sequence data on a computer.
And so quickly too... Dang, what am I doing in this lab? Come to think of it
all I really need is a few trillion four sided dice with A, T, C, G on them.
Heck, my pc could at least make a start, makes my 1500 bp from thirty taxa
look easy, I'll finish this project this afternoon and have another
year to play with imaginary scenarios... :-)
Hmmm.
It might take longer than you think, especially considering we havn't
FOUND all the animals yet. What's the latest estimate on insects, in millions?
How on earth this is supposed to help resolve the SST/AAT "problem" anyway?
Arguments against the validity of sequence data aside (best place for them
:-)) a phylogeny of e.g. all primates based on the entire genome gets us no
further along, and by your own reasoning information from other groups is at
best not directly applicable (actually I think the use of natural 'models' has
a lot more going for it than you do.)
> Meanwhile we can play with imaginary scenarios for fun :-).
Mmm, yes, like the AAT. :-) Or we can try and come up with some 'evidence '
which stands up to the first piece of fundamental zoological / ecological
knowledge or observation that's thrown at it. (Still working on the tears,
James. :-))
Bill
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