Human Mice

How closely related are mice and humans? How many genes are the same? [Excerpts]
 
Answer provided by Lisa Stubbs of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California.
 
Mice and humans (indeed, most or all mammals including dogs, cats, rabbits, monkeys, and apes) have roughly the same number of nucleotides in their genomes -- about 3 billion base pairs. This comparable DNA content implies that all mammals contain more or less the same number of genes, and indeed our work and the work of many others have provided evidence to confirm that notion.
 
I know of only a few cases in which no mouse counterpart can be found for a particular human gene, and for the most part we see essentially a one-to-one correspondence between genes in the two species. The exceptions generally appear to be of a particular type --genes that arise when an existing sequence is duplicated.
 
I believe the number of human genes without a clear mouse counterpart, and vice versa, won't be significantly larger than 1% of the total. Nevertheless, these novel genes may play an important role in determining species-specific traits and functions.
 
However, the most significant differences between mice and humans are not in the number of genes each carries but in the structure of genes and the activities of their protein products. Gene for gene, we are very similar to mice (http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/faq/compgen.shtml).
 
TBC: Similarities are not enough to bridge the enormous gaps between humanity and mice. Consequently, Ms. Stubbs similarity argument must be limited to the genetic level. It is instructive to note that God brought all the animals before Adam to name and that "for Adam there was not found an help meet for him." Some things are simply obvious.