It is one of those scientific procedures that (with our limited minds) we would hardly consider truly “scientific”: first (some claim) they found the genes for A or B, and then they try to prove that these are indeed the ones.
Professor Peter Holland of evolutionary biology and his graduate student Anne Booth (both from the University of Oxford) claimed to have identified the genes responsible for the first, embryonic, phase of human evolution. Unfortunately for them, however, they were unable to determine whether these genes actually do anything, and if so, what.
Until Chinese researchers came to help them. They made a list of all the genes that are “active” in the early stages of embryonic development, and those of the English researchers were included.
Oxford’s research team took heart. It analyzed the data from the Chinese study with great care and discovered that the genes it had pinpointed are active for only a tiny window of time—during the very first stage of cell division, when the embryo goes from 8 to 16 cells. This is the evolutionary moment when some cells begin to form the placenta and others the embryo itself. Once the division into 16 cells is complete and responsibilities are assigned, these specific “evolutionary” genes stop being expressed. In other words, they are “alive” for just a few hours.
If we suppose the discovery holds, it raises various questions. How many other genes, I wonder, do something similar, over longer periods of time? What exactly do geneticists claim to know? What do their own genes know about the scientifically packaged ignorance?