Moving on to the newer version of the thread - I think Bill was right  
when he mentions considering co-evolution with microbes (although I  
don't think that constitutes epigenetics). There's a short article in  
a recent Chemical & Engineering News that points out that  
conservative estimates put the number of bacteria that co-exist with  
a typical person at "trillions ... 10 times more bacterial cells than  
human ones in the body."
"These microbes are not just passive travelers or intermittent  
pathogens. They “perform many functions for us that are not encoded  
by the human genome,” says Jeremy Nicholson, a biomedical chemist at  
Imperial College London. In fact, because thousands of different  
microbial species live upon or within us, the total number of  
bacterial genes being expressed on or in our bodies exceeds the  
number of genes in the human genome by a factor of about 100. “Humans  
run on a relatively small number of basic genes for being such  
complex organisms, and our microbes take up some of the slack,”  
Nicholson says." (the full text is here: http://pubs.acs.org/ 
isubscribe/journals/cen/87/i29/html/8729sci2.html)

I'm sure that bees are in the same boat as us. Not just microflora  
living in the hive, but within the bees themselves...


Kurt


> This thread has strayed far from epigenetics!

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