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From: vamg6792@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Vincent A Mazzarella)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Coelocanth and evolution: x
Message-ID: <1991Jun4.140154.19064@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 4 Jun 91 14:01:54 GMT
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>	This claim is frequently made about animals that physically
>resemble ancient ancestors.  It is, of course, false.  There are many
>examples of "primitive" organisms that exist in an "unchanged" state.
>At the molecular level, their enzymes and DNA have diverged at the same
>rate as "modern" animals.  If an organism is living today, it is "modern,"
>regardless of how it looks.

But, of course, genomes of every human is quite different from every other
human. What matters are those differences causing a change in phenotype.
While the genome of a coelocanth has changed over the millenia, it is
noted that the meaningful changes, those that cause phenotypic changes,
have been few.

The way you present "primitive" and "modern" is pretty much semantics
and an absolutist, old metaphysical philosophy.

--

Vincent Mazzarella
College of Medicine, Neuroscience Program
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
e-mail: mazz@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu