Happy Wonderer

Anyone who thinks that a rat can be described as "a mouse on steriods" has worked with neither, especially as they use such an imprecise term for what is in fact a very large group of species. It is sort of like saying that "ask most people, and they would think that a bird was just a flying bug on steroids."

The difference between rats and mice

hw

Jason Diplock

I daresay any of us could find unfortunate or misleading descriptions or suppositions in evolutionist literature also.
At least you took the trouble to read the article.
Is it the case then that, at worst, what is suggested is a modification to the 'tree' of life?
Is it the case that the concept of species becomes at best a loose fit when genetic mutation is considered?

SEF

As a slightly odd coincidence, way back in the mists of time at the dawn of the computer age, I was the one responsible for teaching the computer at the natural history museum the/a difference between rats and mice. It was set up to play a guessing game but no-one had bothered to inform it that there was a difference. At least it hadn't asked me "is it like a mouse on steroids?" though. So it probably wasn't originally programmed by a creationist.

Jason Diplock

Remind me to bring an umbrella

Sven

This was already cited and commented on by some others, but I still have a problem here. When they say there are "more differences between a man and ape than there are between a rat and a mouse", do they mean genetic or "simply-look-at-the-critter" differences?
If rats and mice (or for the sake of the argument, the specific species of rat and mice they discussed) share a common ancestor a longer time ago than humans and chimps and if the generations of rats+mice are much shorther than humans+chimps --- the we would expect the genetic differences to be greater between rats and mice than between humans and chimps.
Could someone comment on if this is the case or why my reasoning is wrong?

pangloss

Gee - I wonder what LIQUID will think about that....

Jason Diplock

How about a squirrel is a horse on reduction therapy?

SEF

I suspect they are doing the naive pretend-to-look-at-the-critter differences. It also depends on which ape and which mouse/rat (as pointed out in that more detailed article on mice and rats).

On the detail of the differences, once you remove anthropological bias and ignorance, I think the human is closer to the chimp than the mouse is to the rat on both genotype and probably phenotype (experts looking at rodents are very good at identifying them just by teeth and individual bones) and that this is entirely as expected given the life-cycle being longer for apes. The separation time for mouse and rat species seems to be not quite pinned down yet though just like the precise hominid details are not. So calculations based on some exact number of millions of years would be unwise - error bars being necessary (as per usual in real science as opposed to gee-wizz pseudoscience like creationism!).

Sven

Some googling...

Here is an article comparing the genome of rats, mice, and humans!

From the very start it gets clear that rats and mice are rather different genetically...

Goober

The article itself says that 'It is a scientific fact that "there are significant genomic differences."' (Quoting the nature article) and "Nature's April article, comparing mice, rat and humans, states that 67% of the rat's euchromatic genome aligns with the mouse. The euchromatic regions contain the genetically active chromatin (which contains the DNA) used from transcription. Twenty-nine percent of the euchromaticrat genome is rat specific, and does not align with the mouse. "

So the article can hardly be said to be claiming greater genetic similarity, it does look like they are just basing this on a whether they look the same, which is a pretty crappy way of determining the evolutionary distance between two species.

I found it highly ironic that they were rubbishing 'evolutionists' by quoting Nature saying "The debate was fuelled by the naive belief that the rat and mouse were so similar morphologically and evolutionary that the rat sequence would be redundant." and going 'ha ha the evolutionists were wrong, the genomes aren't the same', when they themselves are committing the same naive mistake of assuming that because rats and mice are (vaguely) morphologically similar then they should have similar genomes!