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Comment by throwaway_pdp09 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway_pdp09

WTF horizontal gene transfer = platypus!?!?

Show me some paper on this. I mean an actual scientific paper, not a paper used to roll a yard-long spliff.

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Please don't be a jerk in comments on HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(I took a quick look at your account's past comments and didn't see any previous history of this, which is great.)

Google is free and your aggro stance doesn't encourage me to satisfy your petulant demand.

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes the thread even worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Relating to platypus and horizontal gene transfer, I found this, which seems to be not quite what you're talking about: Horizontal transfer of BovB and L1 retrotransposons in eukaryotes. Genome Biology, 19(1). doi:10.1186/s13059-018-1456-7

Regardless, horizontal gene transfer certainly does happen.

Your paper is what the article I quoted seems to have been based on. It also mentions L1 and BovB. Well, I have some serious taking back to do!

If you'd like a curated collection of many papers on horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotes, it comprises much of the evidence presented at https://www.panspermia.org/archindex.htm . Having followed this collection since 2010, I have gotten the sense that horizontal gene transfer to/from eukaryotes is not only common but an important mechanism of evolution.

Yeah most people think evolution is just natural selection and accidental mutations, which is a high schooler understanding's of it. I'm not being derogatory, it's literally what I learned in high school and I don't blame people for not digging further if they haven't taken classes afterwards.

Well I wouldn't normally but because you're so obviously wrong I thought I'd try. First, I can't find any reference to what you claim. The platypus is a mammal, end of, AFAICT. It has kept features from it's long evolutionary path (split off other mammals 165 million years ago) but no evidence of it being from gene-jumping I could find. eg. https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4828261&page=1

But then accidentally discovered this about gene transfer albeit in another area: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180709101216.h...

"This process is called horizontal transfer, differing from the normal parent-offspring transfer, and it's had an enormous impact on mammalian evolution." For example, Professor Adelson says, 25% of the genome of cows and sheep is derived from jumping genes.

OK, thanks!

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