WOW David Attenborough lied to me about all those animals that evolve exagerated traits because they prefer certain traits in mates.
No one lied to you; you used an incorrect term to describe part of sexual selection. That would fall under the umbrella of selection in general - i.e. one of the founding principals originally described by Darwin.
Sorry I must have missed the memo when it was overturned by science. I know Darwin included this selection process under natural selection but it generally got shifted out because the evolution it creates is not neccessarily the fitess of survival driven.
Actually, Darwin never considered it part of natural selection - indeed,
he wrote a whole book on the topic.
Epigenetic changes usually only last a couple of cellular generations. In metazoans [animals] most (perhaps all) epigenetic changes are "reset" in the embryo - i.e. they are not inherited parent->child.
WOW again can you cite evidence for those statements.
See again here is wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigeneticsYou may want to read your own source, it says exactly the same as I just did -
In sexually reproducing organisms, much of the epigenetic modification within cells is reset during meiosisIf you continue to read your own source you'll see it says exactly what I did - that in simpler organisms we do see inheritance of inter-generational epigenetic inheritance, but it is rare in "higher" organisms, and that such inheritance is often temporary, and is lost over multiple generations.
Gene conversion is a form of mutation, and would be accounted for in the "mutation" stuff I mentioned earlier.
You view Biased gene conversion as a form of gene mutation???????
Because it is; or at least, its how it is treated by biologists. A few examples:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12454074http://mcb.asm.org/content/13/7/4374http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC555444/http://genome.cshlp.org/content/22/3/429.fullAs an example, a quote from the abstract of the last article:
However, pathological mutations can also be introduced by nonreciprocal recombination events between paralogous sequences, a phenomenon known as interlocus gene conversion (IGC).For me mutation is generally defined as a failure to store genetic information faithfully while genetic recombination is exactly that.
Your personal definition is irrelevant. Scientific terms have set & concrete definitions so that when we (scientists) discuss things there is no ambiguity. As I demonstrated above, gene conversion* is treated by biologists as a form of mutation.
And, I would point out, that gene conversion fullfills your incorrect definition of mutation as well - you loose the "faithfulness" of the genetic information.
*we have to be careful with this term, as another form of gene conversion - antigen switching via gene conversion - is arguably not a mutation and rather an evolved mechanism of gene regulation. Hence, the gene conversion you are talking about should be called "interstrand gene conversion" (if tlaking about conversion between two alleles) or "interlocus gene conversion" (if talking about conversion between separate genes) to separate it from the other forms of gene conversion.
Bryan
