Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Why is WikiPedia so slow?

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Vern Green wrote:
> > No, it doesn't say that.  In fact, the string "chimp" does not even occur
> > in that article.  Have you really stooped to outright lying in an attempt
> > to promote your religion?
>
> Since you can't be bothered with the details I will have to explain it to you.
>
> The article I posted said that Mice and Men share all but 16 of more
> than 700 genomes. If you average that out, men and mice are 99.98%
> alike in their genetic makeup. They share common susceptability to
> diseases and many of the same genes that control blood pressure and
> heart rate are found in both species.
>
> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0831_050831_chimp_genes.html
> Conversly, this article says we are only 96% like chimps in genetic
> makeup. Interestingly enough, Chimps are not susceptable to many of
> the diseases that humans are. Yet somehow chimps become the "closest
> living relative".

From briefly looking at the articles, I would come up with this 
analogie.  Suppose that you have several pieces of software, and you 
want to examine when they were written and when they had code forks. 
You would look at similarities.

At one level you would look and see if they shared common code segments. 
 I think that this would be the "95%" type figures.  Or you could see 
whether the memory maps (because certain code portions might be the same 
but in a different order) are identical - this would be the "85%" type 
figures.  Or (supposing that the software is a virus scanner) you could 
look and see which particular virii the software scanned for - since 
these definitions are uploaded onto your computer once a week or so, 
these could be very different even in otherwise almost identical 
software (this would be the DNA for auto-immune diseases, etc).

The commonality between human DNA and mouse or even wheat DNA would 
represent common libraries, like for example, all software developed on 
Linux will include the glib libraries.  My impression is that the 
commonality of these libraries across different species is rather 
impressive, so the analogue of say glib versus windows libraries (which 
presumably differ a lot) just doesn't seem to hold in the biological world.

I think that evolution where species develop one from another is fairly 
well established.  But as best I know, the question "how did this all 
come about in the first place" is still largely mysterious, although 
theories do abound.

--

Stephen Montgomery-Smith
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://www.math.missouri.edu/~stephen

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