1.3.1 The importance of a shared evolutionary
history
The great twentieth century evolutionary biologist
Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that: regions whose evolution has been constrained by the need to
perform a specific function. In other words, we can identify
a gene not because it looks like a gene, nor because an
organism treats it like a gene (i.e., makes a product from it),
but because it evolves like a gene. This approach, sometimes
called ‘phylogenetic footprinting’ or ‘shadowing’ can be
extended by examining genomes from a range of primates
(Boffelli et al., 2003).