Tag: genomes
Peer-Reviewed Paper Reviews Ten “Anomalies” that Contradict the Junk DNA Paradigm
John Mattick uses the language of historian of science Thomas Kuhn to predict that we are witnessing a “paradigm shift” away from the concept of junk DNA.
Paper Digest: What Mutation Accumulation Tells Us About Evolution
Though more than a decade old, this work caught my attention for its possible relevance to our current experiences with COVID-19.
Quiz: Is This a Prediction from the Tree of Life?
Conservation of function, but not genes, can be understood with an analogy to natural language. Consider two sentences.
Starship Enterprise: Fungal Transposons Boldly Go
Newly recognized large transposable elements in fungi dubbed Starships may not be selfish after all.
Even More Mammoth Devolution
The lesson from woolly mammoth studies, and many other ones, is that it is much faster and easier to break or blunt a gene than to improve or make a new one.