Washington: Biologists have reaffirmed a century-old “law” that said evolution cannot reverse itself. In the mean time, biologists have tracked down genes that control the handedness of snail shells, and they turn out to be similar to the genes used by humans to set up the left and right sides of the body.
Boris Igic, assistant professor of biological sciences, and Emma Goldberg, a post-doctoral student in Igic’s University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) laboratory, became suspicious of those methods, which they also had used in evolutionary studies of plant fertilization.
Meanwhile, the finding, reported online in advance of publication in Nature by University of California, Berkeley, researchers, indicates that the same genes have been responsible for establishing the left-right asymmetry of animals for 500-650 million years, originating in the last common ancestor of all animals with bilateral body organization, creatures that include everything from worms to humans, according to a press release issued by EurekAlert.
