Mini-thought experiment about the nested hierarchy

[evograd (Blogging Graduate Student)]

@colewd

So are all these sequences close? How close?

We’ve been over this before, in at least these 2 threads:

James Tour on Orphan Genes

A colleague of mine sent me a link yesterday to a rather lengthy essay by James Tour. Much of it is on pre-biotic chemistry, but Tour eventually hits on a few evolution-related topics like the ENCODE project and orphan genes. https://www.jmtour.com/personal-topics/evolution-creation/ He has this to say about orphan genes: Then again, other geneticists contest that many biologists have simply ignored a rapidly growing list of thousands of putative orphans in the human genome because they cannot find homologous non-gene sequences in the chimpanzee genome. If it is true that some biologists are ignoring data that does not easily fit with their common descent model, it is disconcerting. Does anyone know who these geneticists are and where these claims are? A quick Google search brought me to an essay from Uncommon Descent. The claims there sound a lot like Tour’s claim, but surely this is not where he is getting his information on a serious scientific topic. Right? The UD article …

https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/comments-on-james-tour-on-orphan-genes/5009