[Dragaera] Boing!

[Davdi Silverrock]

On 9/7/06, Davdi Silverrock wrote:
> On 9/7/06, Philip Hart wrote:
> >
> > We've got some fly wing-making genes iirc, but ...
> >
>
> I'm 99.9% sure we don't.
>
> That is, I'm pretty sure that the lineage of vertebrates split off
> from all other invertebrate lineages long before flies evolved wings.

Supporting reference:

   http://tolweb.org/Bilateria/2459

Note that Deuterostomia (which includes chordata (vertebrates)) is a
parallel lineage to Ecdysozoa (which includes arthropoda (includes
insects)), not a descendant (damn, there's that word again) lineage.

>
> Perhaps you are thinking of Hox genes being amazingly strongly
> conserved in all animal lineages?  I think that if mammalian Hox is
> transposed to flies, the flies still develop wings normally.  But Hox
> is regulatory; it doesn't actually code for wing development itself.
>

Supporting reference:

[begin cite]

Biologists discovered that the Hox genes did the same job in all of
these animals: specifying different sections of their head-to-tail
axis, just as they do in insects.
Hox genes in these different animals are so similar that scientists
can replace a defective Hox gene in a fruit fly with the corresponding
Hox gene from a mouse, and the fly will still grow its proper body
parts.  Even though mice and fruit flies diverged from a common
ancestor more than 600 million years ago, the gene can still exert its
power.

[end cite] (/Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea/, by Carl Zimmer, pg 121)