以下是引用qianrene在2007-7-4 21:52:00的发言: I've mentioned how DNA has solved many mysteries in biology. And today I want to talk about how it might relate to hypothesis about the travels of the green turtle. Every winter some green turtles make a 2000km journey from Brazil to Ascension Island in the middle of Atlantic, where they mate and lay eggs. But the question is why do they travel so far to lay their eggs? One researcher hypothesized that there are two parts to the explanation. One is natal homing, the instinct that drives green turtles to always return to the beach where they were hatched. The second part has to do with continental drift, the theory that the positions of earth continents have changed considerably overtime. Brazil and Ascension Island were once much closer together, and continental drift drove them apart. But the turtles kept on going back to the island where they hatched. However another scientist question this explanation on the ground that it would be very unlikely that conditions would allow generations of turtles over hundreds of millions of years to keep going back to the same nesting ground every single year. So, what is the connection to DNA? Well, there are groups of green turtles that nest in locations other than the Ascension Island. If green turtles always return to the place where they were hatched, then the turtles that have been going to the Ascension Island to nest would have been genetically isolated long enough to have DNA that was very different from the green turtles that nest elsewhere. But when scientists examine DNA from these turtles, their DNA wasn't that different from the DNA of the turtles that go to Ascension Island. Do you have a shock? Well, we still don't know the answer to the question about why a certain group of turtles go to Ascension Island, but this study was a nice example of the usefulness of DNA analysis to biology.有人能看懂为什么在isolation的情况下它们的DNA是一样的吗?我觉得听听力时遇到这种听懂了词语但是不知道逻辑关系的时候最倒霉。 你划线的那地,说如果turtle是各回各家下蛋的话, 那么回到不同地方下单的turtle,它们的gene应该不同(因为它们isolation,不会有gene的连结).可是结果发现它们的gene一样. 有种可能就是(或证明)上文说的大陆漂移学说(那些现在不在一起的地方原本是一个地,后来才分开的). |