Only it again comes from the discovery institute (They really are the most prolific denialists on the Web, sorry to harp on them). See Is Darwinism Indispensable to Comparative Medicine? Meet Galen, Vesalius, Harvey, and Linnaeus." It is essentially a litany of the comparative anatomy that proceeded Darwin's birth followed by this paragraph.

The father of modern comparative biology was Carolus Linnaeus. The 18th century Swedish physician, botanist and zoologist laid the foundation for modern taxonomy. He advanced the binomial ("genus and species") system of classification, and his work is the basis for biological nomenclature used throughout the world today. Linnaeus' system was based on detailed knowledge of the physical similarities and differences between living things. Linnaeus based his classification on his inference that living things were designed.

Was Darwin indispensable to comparative medicine and biology? Consider this. Linnaeus, the father of modern comparitive biology and a devout Lutheran, died during a church service in Uppsala Cathedral on January 10, 1778. That was 31 years and 33 days before Charles Darwin was born.

This sounds like the kind of silly crap that the anti-animal testing people think we do in the lab. We just take apart animals and look at their organs for fun. Ummm, no. In my lab meeting this morning we mentioned/discussed evolution and conserved sequences three times in regards to comparative medicine. What were we discussing? The conservation of promoter sequences in a gene between species as a way of identifying the cis regulatory elements that control gene expression. More simply, the DNA that is upstream of your gene - it's important. It contains little bits of code called cis elements that bind to transcription factors, and when the right transcription factors are bound then transcription starts, mRNA is made, then protein etc. The cis elements that a promoter may contain are varied, and are important in determining the developmental, physiologic and pathologic expression of genes. It's very much like a computer code that controls when a program turns on and off.

The problem is that for a given sequence upstream of the promoter, cis elements may be anywhere from several base pairs away from the gene to hundreds or even tens of thousands of base pairs away, and in the intervening region there will be many sequences that look like they may be important, but really are not. How do you tell what is important and what is not? How is possible to figure out which cis elements are relevant to control of your gene and which you should mutate to figure out what they do?

Well, one clever way to do it (after an initial deletional analysis) is to compare the promoter sequences from multiple species to see what stays the same. It's a pretty simple idea. One would predict that if a sequence is required for the proper control of a gene that it would be preserved throughout evolution as a great deal of the developmental programming and gene expression between animals is conserved (not identical, but similar). So you align the sequences, and the DNA base pairs that have stayed the same from fish, to chickens to mice to rats to humans (or even just mice to humans) are very likely to be the regulatory elements of interest. This is also one of the first things done in analysis of a new protein or cDNA sequence to determine which elements are responsible for the proper structure and function of a protein. Here's an example from my lab of promoter analysis based on conservation between species.



In this case it's a comparison of mouse, rat and rabbit to determine the conservation of the CArG cis elements in the Smooth Muscle Myosin Heavy Chain promoter. The dashes correspond to matches between the promoters, while the letters in the lower strands indicate the differences between species. This level of conservation of cis elements between species is very suggestive of the importance of the element in regulation of the gene. And sure enough, they were.

I suppose though if all biologists did was sit around dissecting animals and doing comparative anatomy, maybe it wouldn't be as relevant to evolutionary biology. After all, they did long before Darwin. But we've progressed beyond comparative anatomy people and yes, in the course of the day, almost every day, we consider the evolutionary implications of the molecular biology we study because it's helpful. This kind of complete and total ignorance of the mechanics of biomedical research is the kind of crap I usually encounter from the anti-testing people, I guess the DI is expanding its frontiers into new areas of idiocy.

Source: Cort S. Madsen, James C. Hershey, Martina B. Hautmann, Sheryl L. White, and Gary K. Owens, Expression of the Smooth Muscle Myosin Heavy Chain Gene Is Regulated by a Negative-acting GC-rich Element Located between Two Positive-acting Serum Response Factor-binding Elements J. Biol. Chem. 272: 6332-6340.

Labels: Evolution denialism