Thise one is sure to fire up the debates :-)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21...ellularity.html

Interesting. I hope there are some followups.

Of course you want to watch it that the thread doesn't get hijacked by the creationists. I suggest you not respond to any such posts here, just go over and do it in NQS.

Bill Gill

I agree with the critics that since ancestral yeast was multi-cellular, the yeast in this experiment was able to express genes producing atavistic characters for multi-cellular (MC) behavior.

I would expect in this case that MC behaviors in this case would show evidence analogous to the bony atavistic tails of humans beings; that is, something that doesn't quite work so well.

Either way, the follow-on experiment with algae is a logical next step.

Related advances:
Craig Venter's team creates artificial life
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=synthetic-genome-cell

"Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions." by Powner MW, Gerland B, Sutherland JD.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19444213

It's a lot of work, but slowly humanity is chipping away.

The atavistic tail actually may have some use. It curves to the front and provides some support to the internals of the bowel region. If it had no use it would probably be gone by this time. After all having to grow that bone requires some energy expenditure, which could be used elsewhere.

Bill Gill

I think you are referring to vestigial tail, not atavistic tail. They're two different aspects of the same general phenomenon - but they are different (although wiki seems to have conflated them as well).

Vestigial tail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coccyx

Atavistic tail: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/images/tail.jpg