Not sure wat means, but it certainly sounds as if evolution has evolved the capacity for further evolvability. I´m sure that´s entirely random, deterministic, naturalistic or blind. Nothing to see here, move along...
So "junk DNA" might be what drives speciation? So the evolution of new species is encoded in the junk DNA? Is that what you are telling me here?
No, it can´t be, because we all KNOW that everything is blind, blind, blind, blind...and that this blindness, purely by chance (oh, pardon, I mean a combination of random mutations and non-random natural selection blah blah) after 3 billion years leads to the evolution of...the highly cultured British Victorian gentleman. Which just happens to be the kind of person with the right kind of morality I favor. But that´s not my fault, of course. Not my fault that blind evolution eventually (eventually, damn you!) leads to the teleological result favored by me. And other British gentlemen, of course.
So *please* do stop this preposterous nonsense!
Well, there must be lots of "junk-DNA", or at least a lot of DNA of very little importance. The reason for this is both simple and scary: We are contantly damaging or DNA. To some extent this is repaired but often it is not. If most of our DNA is "Junk", its no big deal that it gets damaged. If it wasnt there important DNA-stuff would be damaged instead. Sometimes the important stuff still gets damaged just out of bad luck. In that case you might suffer terrible things yourself, or your offspring somwhere down the line will suffer for it.
ReplyDeleteThe oxygen we breathe is genontoxic, even in the cleanest form avaiable at a mountaintop in the stonage or whatever. Its still (a very low risk) russian roulette for our DNA to breathe it.
Add stuff like Benzen to the air(used in concentrated form in animal testing to induce cancer in the testsubjects) and that russian roulette is not so low risk anymore.
Benzen by the way keeps increasing in the air in most parts of the world due to increased numbers of cars etc... And the lung cancer rates in europe keep going up inspite there being fewer smokers than ever.
So i probably still believe in "junk DNA". If not, terrible taught, none of our DNA is junk and all that damage to our "Junk DNA" will have consequences in the future that we havent even understood yet. A scientific explanation for original sin coming up perhaps? Add epigentics and i think we are coming very close to something i think it is not entirerly wrong to call original sin.
Interesting points. Epigenetics seem like a fruitful area of research, for instance what is the culture-epigenetic connection?
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