Pissing Off The Religo Nutcases

Not only are our ancestors apes, but also sea urchins. Must havce something to do with the spikey purple hair. Dobson must be crying.

There was great interest in the sea urchin as a target for genome sequencing because these animals share a common ancestor with humans, scientists said. That ancestor lived over 540 million years ago and gave rise to the Deuterostomes, the super phylum of animals that includes phyla such as echinoderms and chordates, the phylum to which humans and other vertebrates belong.

All Deuterostomes are more closely related to each other than they are to any other animals not included in the Deuterostome super phylum. For example, among sequenced genomes, the genomes of fruit flies and worms are more distant from the sea urchin genome than is the human genome.

"This analysis shows that sea urchins share substantially more genes and biological pathways with humans than previously suspected," said Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, which supported the research. "Comparing the genome of the sea urchin with that of the human and other model organisms will provide scientists with novel insights into the structure and function of our own genome."