Slashdot Mirror
Prions, Darwin's Friend
blamanj writes "Prions, the recently discovered bits of protein thought to be responsible for mad cow disease are turning up all over. It has been shown that prions change the behavior of yeasts, and may therefore offer a speedy way for yeast to evolve."
...from DNA methylation effecting cell differentiation and cloning and cancer to this new possible epigenetic mechanism for coping with environmental stresses. It doesn't live in the DNA sequence it lives in the runtime. How much more really cool stuff will be found that may be driven by the DNA or the puzzle pieces may be sequenced by it, but doesn't exist "on paper."
Heinlein's Methuselah's Children talked about genetically improving humans. Unfortunately, unimproved humans found the "improved" human too revolting to deal with.
Star Trek: TOS touched on human evolution with Khan's supermen, as well as with the two personnel (the commander(lieutenant?) and the psychologist) who got zapped by an ion storm.
Isaac Asimov touched on it in his universe with the Spacers. (Specifically one of the first fifty or so worlds colonized from Earth...that one developed a race of humans with telekinetic power.)
The overall fictional consensus seems to be to not directly force humans to evolve, but to let things happen as they do. The vast majority of humans are intolerant of overt differences from the norm. And the "superior" breed will get a superiority complex that really causes a clash.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
It was so bad, that from looking at mitochondrial DNA it looks like we are all descend from a one woman.
_Every_ animal and plant species trivially descends from one individual (counted as females from mitochondrial DNA for simplicity, but it holds for the "real" DNA as well). Nothing strange about it.
What makes our recent past interesting is that the youngest common ancestor is a lot younger than the species. That can indicate a population crunch - though it is not proof of it by any means.
A speciation event would look just the same, for instance - a separate subgroup splits off and grows to dominate, while the original species dies off. Of course, nobody would see it as a speciation event until enough time has passed for the distinct groups to actually differ enough to no longer be able to interbreed.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Speaking as a biologist with research interests in molecular genetics (mutation specifically) and who spent a good deal of time working in a yeast lab this is just fucking amazing. There is a great deal of potential in this.
If prions are acting as a form of epigenetic plasmids then... wow. I mean, just wow. The sheer possibility for customized prions for gene therapy in somatic eukaryotic cells could be huge.
If "safe" prions could be harnessed or even engineered and a human could be placed in an environment that would stress their inbuilt abilities - eg space travel, it must be possible to pass on the "benefits" of their MACRO evolution to the next generation - perhpas getting rid of legs or whatever else would suit long term space dwellers.
Imagine a ship travelling to our nearest neigbouring star, it would take several generations for us to reach there so the colonists when they arrived wouldn't actually be "human" like we are!
Now if we can work out the environment on the alien planet before we send off the ship, we could engineer the prion/environment to force evolution's hand to create the modifications required to live in the environment they're going to.
I feel a novel coming on!