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Opposable Thumbs and Upright Walking Caused By "Junk DNA"
quinnlynn writes "A group of research scientists at Yale discovered that the evolution of opposable thumbs and upright walking in humans is due to changes in the genome in the areas still classified as "junk DNA." Quoting: 'Results from a comparative analysis of the human, chimpanzee, rhesus macaque and other genomes reported in the journal Science suggest our evolution may have been driven not only by sequence changes in genes, but by changes in areas of the genome once thought of as "junk DNA." ... Researchers have long suspected changes in gene expression contributed to human evolution, but this had been difficult to study until recently because most of the sequences that control genes had not been identified. In the last several years, scientists have discovered that non-coding regions of the genome, far from being junk, contain thousands of regulatory elements that act as genetic "switches" to turn genes on or off.'"
Yale has also recently completed sequencing the Trichoplax genome. Trichoplax has the simplest known animal genome, and it shares 80 percent of its genes (comprised of 98 million base pairs) with humanity. Professor Stephen Dellaporta was quoted saying, "We are [excited] to find that Trichoplax contains shared pathways and defined regulatory sequences that link these most primitive ancestors to higher animal species. The Trichoplax genome will serve as a type of 'Rosetta Stone' for understanding the origins of animal-specific pathways."
Every time early researchers solve part of a problem they seem to label the part they haven't solved as being unimportant or irrelevant.
You found out what 10% of the brain does (the sensory/motor areas)? The other 90% must not be used for anything.
Find out how to read the DNA code used for a few percent of the genome (the codons to protein via RNA parts)? The rest must be junk.
When will we learn? Writing "Here there be dragons" at least had to benefit that it led future explorers to (correctly) assume that these places might have something interesting in them.
--MarkusQ
P.S. I can't do car analogies, but for the last fifty years or so we've known how to extract strings from the data segment and thought we understood "the" genetic code. Now it's turning out that all that "junk DNA" in the code segment actually has a significant regulatory role in deciding which strings get printed, and when. Who would have guessed?
Junk DNA doesn't exist. It's just DNA we don't understand.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I don't understand it therefor it must be junk! Perfectly scientific.
Most scientists do not actually do this. Most reporters, on the other hand, do.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Apparently 90% of the universe is made of some weird useless stuff. Might as well use the same term for stuff we don't understand.
Deleted
Saying that any DNA is "Junk DNA" is like saying that all dark matter in the universe (which we don't quite yet fully understand) is "Junk Matter."
It's the sort of misnomer that has no place in science IMO.
It always blows my mind when I think about things like this, how people think that at this point in our development that humans are the be all end all, that we understand everything there is to understand - it's such bullshit. I am not saying that our science and advancements aren't incredible and amazing; they are - I am only saying that it is incredibly foolish to think we know everything..about anything really... (in the natural world especially).
Biologists discover "flags". Seriously, these guys should just bring a programmer on-staff -- preferably assembly, as decoding the arcane secrets of all Earth life should be a breeze for anyone whose day job involves the x86 instruction set.
[Sigh] Every time a biology story is posted on /. it seems like we get a bunch of posts along the lines of "dumb biologists, any techie would have figured that out a long time ago!"
Please don't confuse the reality with the dumbed-down versions that appear in the popular press or the even more dumbed-down summaries. Bioinformatics, which is what I do, has been an established science for over a decade, and I can assure you that computer scientists have been working with biologists for a lot longer than that. Most of the obvious computational analogies have already been thought of -- and most, unfortunately, have had to be discarded. Despite some of the superficial similarities, genomes are not programs, at least not in the way CS people use the word. They're more like a collection of heuristics, and even that way of thinking about things breaks down when you start looking at the details.
I'm more on the CS/math/stat side of things, and my colleagues on the bio side are often mystified by what I do -- but I'm equally often mystified by what they do. Both CS and biology are tremendously complex fields, and if you think you can arbitrarily apply lessons learned from one field to the other, you will almost always turn out to be wrong. Biologists and computer scientists can learn a lot from working with each other; work in one field very often leads to advances in the other; and by all means (he says, with a healthy dollop of self-interest) the areas of collusion should continue to grow. But thinking that there's some natural equivalence in one field to what you know from the other is simply a mistake.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It has been recognised for some time that so-called "junk" DNA is nothing of the sort, but is almost certainly associated with gene expression to some degree.
So basicly the known 26000 genes are somewhat of a coding library with wellknown functions, and the "junk DNA" is the actual program code calling those functions?
I would say it's more like 50 year old COBOL air traffic control program that's been patched thousands of times by different people. Nothing is where it should be or done the way it should be, no guidelines were followed, but somehow it still manages to compile because each incremental change was tested before patching the source tree. (Hopefully someone can convert this to a car analogy for me.)
a lot of my code that's been around for a long time may contain as much as 30% commented out code, not to mention all the stuff in #ifdef blocks.
You know, getting rid of all that stuff is what version control systems are for.
"JUNK" = pseudo scientist speak for "we cannot explain this one" and "it goes against all of our foregone conclusions".
Now REAL scientists would state it as "Here is a DNA sequence we found that we think is related to opposable thumbs and walking upright, but we have not fully unravelled its secrets."
Why was the parent modded down as flamebait?
For the same reason that your post is modded funny (it would be troll or flamebait otherwise). Especially considering it doesnt "disprove" evolutionary biology in the slightest and everyone here knows it.
/. of all places.
Even if it was a creationist posting (which I doubt, the ahahaha kind of gives it away) he knew he was flaming when he wrote that posting it on
The so called "junk DNA" being not really junk is old news, saying it "disproves" evolutionary biology is just like a typical creationist troll trying to "disprove it" giving the scientific side no added information as if its been dogmatic since Darwins time.
The scientific model is one that ALWAYS changes however slight with *shock horror* new discoveries and new information we are always working on.
The reason why creationists are viewed as stupid is they argue without any understanding at what they are trying to disprove. Essensially trolling with an army of strawmen, and yes I have encountered that MANY times and it is very fustrating.
I get the sneeking feeling that you are trolling too, considering that you were modded "funny" instesad of "insightful" leads me to think that I am not alone in that assumpsion
Make SELinux enforcing again!