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8% of Your DNA Comes From a Virus
An anonymous reader writes "About 8 percent of human genetic material comes from a virus and not from our ancestors, according to an article by University of Texas at Arlington biology professor Cédric Feschotte, published in the Jan. 7, 2010 issue of Nature magazine."
Isn't this "discovery" sort of like the Bible Code? So they searched the human genome and found a bunch of "virus like" patterns. Any sufficiently large set of information is going to give you some matches on just about anything you search for.
It does, but as a side effect you are unresponsive 80% of your time.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Much like someone who copies the content of their old computer straight over to a new computer every few years. Repeat this process a few billion times, and you'll be quite surprised at the amount of sheer useless crap that just keeps getting copied. Voila! DNA.
Actually I'm pretty sure 100% of our DNA is basically crap that only exists because at some point in the past it was better at copying itself ;)
where BDV here is the virus whose DNA they were searching for in the human genome. There you go, if you're depressed, manic or schizophrenic, it could be one of your ancestors got a brain virus.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
The weird thing is that research is now showing that a lot of the so-called "junk dna" is actually used indirectly. Maybe we like junk food so much because we eat what we are? :-)
But this whole thing isn't all that surprising when you consider where our mitochondria came from.
"The viral DNA that isn't conducive to death probably stayed in." -- There, fixed that for you.
How would they know?
Hero of Alexandria didn't have trains in mind when he made his Aeolipile. It was used as a fancy way to open temple doors. Only much later people figured out a practical use for it.
Boolean algebra was a very obscure branch nobody cared about until it suddenly became very useful.
Lasers, IIRC didn't have an immediate application when they were invented. They definitely didn't have DVD drives in mind.
Ahhh religion, where changing flesh into bread and blood into wine isnt considered "witchcraft". Yet all other "magics" was at one time punishable.
Hypocrisy, it loves religion.
No, 8% of your DNA comes from viruses that infected your anscestors' reproductive organs and were passed on to you. TFA is actually an interesting read.
Free Martian Whores!
I am a pretty smart guy who doesn't understand the utility of pure research.
One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong!
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Evolution is a very noisy process. It does not assure that we are all maximally fit, only fit enough that all our ancestors managed to reproduce. The boundary of viability is people who are viable, but whose children are not.
Viral DNA might be introduced to our genome as a side-effect of viral infection at a faster rate than natural selection can remove it out of our genome, even if it is harmful to us.
And any benefit from schitzophrenia would have to be so significant as to outweigh the cost of losing touch with reality, which is enormous. Perhaps our DNA code for a randomized process that usually results in a healthy amount of creativity, but sometimes too much. That gene could be preserved even if it is deleterious in outliers. In fact the variability of gene expression ensures that genes advantageous in their mean effect are sometimes less advantageous, i.e. relatively harmful.
Ahhh religion, where changing flesh into bread and blood into wine isnt considered "witchcraft". Yet all other "magics" was at one time punishable. Hypocrisy, it loves religion.
And Slashdot, where every story about biology turns into an attack on Christianity or some other faith. Things were different in the Pit & the Pendulum days, but lately it seems like you attack them way more than they attack you.
The ability for a free human to decide what he does or does not believe is about as far from 'unimportant' as one can possibly get.
You can be insensitive to it if you wish, but this is a thin excuse at best.
Yes, because there's no real difference between pulling people out of their homes and torturing them to death and making fun of people's ignorance in an online forum.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
In fact, back when lasers were first invented, people referred to them as "a solution looking for a problem". They were so cool, but for a while nobody could think of anything useful to do with them.
Silly folks.
"Insufficient awesome" is the problem, and lasers are the answer.
The enemies of Democracy are
Speak for yourself, I can hear God talking all the time in my head.
If only he finally realized I don't understand ancient hebrew...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, atheists don't 'demand' anything really. Atheists are generally pretty normal people, just like most people who are religious are normal.
Nutjobs, who also happen to be atheists demand retarded shit just like religous nutjobs, they tend to be more 'scientific nutjobs'. And by that I mean that they seem to worship something they call science instead of religion, yet blindly ignore scientific method in favor of blindly believing what some guy wrote in a book/journal/website.
Same nut jobs, different books, same ignorance, and as you are so quick to show us ... the same name calling and he said she said.
Perhaps before calling someone a 'shitnut freak' for 'ranting against ' a religious group, you should consider not 'ranting against a(ll) religious group(s). Its cool though, you've obviously got plenty of angst to work out, you go on being mad at everyone in the world ... nutjob.
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