Humans Have Different Sets of Genes

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

Continuing the discussion from Comments on Darwinism's Falsification:

@swamidass

Yet it appears all humans share the same gene set.

Not true. We do not.

@colewd

Can you expand on this. What is the level of variation?

One of the surprising findings of recent years is that different humans often have different sets of functional genes. This finding, to my knowledge, became known through the ExAc project (is that right @glipsnort?):

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19057

A more recent paper, reviewing confirmations of this result is here:

Human knockouts and phenotypic analysis in a cohort with a high rate of...

Basically, a large number of apparently normal humans have genes that have been knocked out. They are missing the “full” complement of genes, and appear to suffer no ill effect. This demonstrates, as far as we can tell, that not all the genes we have are necessary.

[glipsnort (Steve Schaffner)]

@swamidass

One of the surprising findings of recent years is that different humans often have different sets of functional genes. This finding, to my knowledge, became known through the ExAc project (is that right @glipsnort?):

It was seen prior to ExAc in Thousand Genomes data: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature15394

[sfmatheson (Stephen Matheson)]

@swamidass

One of the surprising findings of recent years is that different humans often have different sets of functional genes. This finding, to my knowledge, became known through the ExAc project (is that right @glipsnort?):

If you’re talking about CNVs, they have been known to be big players in human genetic variation since at least 2004. (Two papers, cited here FYI)

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

I was talking instead about natural human knockouts, cases where apparently normal humans are missing a gene entirely.