I remember when we had 80,000 genes. I really do. Then along came the Human Genome Project and suddenly we had 30,000 genes, hardly more than your average mouse. Suddenly again, we now have a mere 18,000 genes (well 18,308, but I don't think that will stand for long). At this rate, we'll all have less genes than your average E. coli.
It's all devolution, right?
Late note: Larry Moran gives the history. It seems we are losing genes at a somewhat slower rate...
More like this
John Hawks has an interesting post on what it means to be human in which he argues that our "human-ness" (humanity?) is our shared evolutionary history. I like it. But Hawks also writes the following:
Targeted discovery of novel human exons by comparative genomics:
There was a time not that long ago when sequencing a single gene would be hailed as a scientific milestone.
There was a competition for the best gene number prediction:
Currently, ENSEMBL's human gene number is 21,662.
and the VEGA consortium that manually annotates the human genome counts 32235 genes. Seemingly, the number heavily depends on the gene definition used.
The human UniGene database (build #200) counts 28138 sets with at least one mRNA