04 April 2008

Quiz 2 on genome size. How's it going so far?

Quiz 2. (Directions, and rationale, can be found in a previous post.) Ready?

Which organism has the larger genome?

This one? Or this one?
1
2
3

Which of these organisms displays the greatest "degree of advancement"? Which would require the most "information" to build and maintain? What predictions would design theorists such as William Dembski and Hugh Ross offer us in this exercise?

Think, people. If the proposals of these thinkers made any sense at all (at least with respect to non-coding DNA), it would be pretty straightforward to determine which of these organisms would have the largest genome, and which would have the smallest. But if you want to do well on this quiz, you don't want to peek at Hugh Ross' paper. You're better off throwing darts. Blindfolded.

3 comments:

John Farrell said...

It's Sat. morning and I'm just having coffee. Let me be counterintuitive and guess the gardern snail and the giraffe.

(before you throw an eraser at me!)

:)

Stephen Matheson said...

Relax: it's almost impossible to throw a dry-erase eraser accurately.

Are you guessing the snail is the largest and the giraffe is the smallest?

NOT. Even "counterintuitive" is too nonrandom for this cruel quiz. >:-) But since I'm such a nice guy (ask my students), here's a hint: the two mammals are in the middle, if you rank the 6 species by genome size. And the largest exceeds the smallest by about 40-fold.

John Farrell said...

I was actually thinking both the snail and the giraffe were the largest...

And yes...this is cruel!