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New Genes May Arise From Junk DNA
An anonymous reader writes: Junk DNA (or noncoding DNA) is a term for section of a DNA strand that doesn't actually do much. Huge tracts of the human genome consist of junk DNA, and researchers are now finding that it may be more useful than previously thought. "For most of the last 40 years, scientists thought that [gene duplication] was the primary way new genes were born — they simply arose from copies of existing genes. The old version went on doing its job, and the new copy became free to evolve novel functions. Certain genes, however, seem to defy that origin story. They have no known relatives, and they bear no resemblance to any other gene. ... But in the past few years, a once-heretical explanation has quickly gained momentum — that many of these orphans arose out of so-called junk DNA."
One of the properties of junk DNA is that it can endure brutal mutations since it's not used for anything. So over time it can change a LOT. Then suddenly another mutation suddenly activates it by mistake and *poof* you have a new magic super-power (more often than not, lethal). Starting from a crucial gene won't work since the slightest modification will reduce your survival rate, since by definition it's crucial.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I suspect that in the future, scientists will laugh at the notion of "junk DNA" and think of it as just as much of a myth as "you only use 10% of your brain".
What is heretical about novel new genes arising out of junk DNA? Molecular biologists have known for many years that so-called "junk" DNA played a number of roles; regulatory, and that most certainly novel genes could arise.
Oh, I get it, this is the idiotss otherwise known as "scientific journalists" hyping up a rather unremarkable finding, and fixating on the word "junk" much as they, in ignorance and the need to sex up stories, concentrated on the word "God" in the "God particle"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So take your pick, is Einstein wrong
Science proceeds toward understanding of nature that is less wrong* over time. So it's very probable that Einstein didn't have the whole story.
Aristotle was wrong about the relationship between mass and acceleration due to gravity. Galileo Galilei proved him wrong. Galileo was wrong about gravity being independent of location. Isaac Newton proved him wrong. Newton was wrong about the effect of gravity at what we now call relativistic speeds. Albert Einstein proved him wrong. Einstein was still wrong about "God doesn't play dice with the world." Each of them stood on giants' shoulders to become less wrong.
* Yes, "less wrong" is a thing. Assuming that "wrong" is an ungradable adjective like "unique", "perfect", and "parallel" is a fallacy.
What is heretical about novel new genes arising out of junk DNA? Molecular biologists have known for many years that so-called "junk" DNA played a number of roles; regulatory, and that most certainly novel genes could arise.
There is a small percentage of biologists which really, really would like acquired traits to be heritable (as a work study job in college, I worked in the lab of one of them, and we were cautioned not to talk about his theory outside the lab).
Every so often, one of the proponents of the idea of heritable changes due to environmental pressure, or more formally, either Lysenkoism or Lamarckism, tries to find a mechanism that could make it work. Even though it's never been demonstrated (the biologist in the lab I worked at was attempting experiments with, among other things, chelodina longicolis diets, to force physical changes, which he hoped the offspring would inherit, even though not on that diet).
This theory is what's known as "soft inheritance".
The main premise for its development in the first place was that Joseph Stalin was all pissy about genetic being a non-Soviet idea, and wanted an nice, Soviet alternative that better fit the ideology he put forth. This actually influenced a lot of decisions in Soviet agriculture that didn't work out badly enough that they ended up importing wheat from the West.
The last go-round was trying to use introns as a mechanism whereby he introns were involved in making traits heritable (and before that, it was endogenous viruses, such as PERV - Porcine Endogenous Retro Virus). Those were the main ones. The've also tried to explain it with varying degrees of gene methylation, and so on. Todays flavor is non-coding DNA (the correct scientific name for "junk genes").
Unless the can demo it in plants, mice, or fruit flies, etc., don't expect that the idea will go anywhere directly.
The sad part is, if they had concentrated on the punctuated equalibria model, which the article mentions, instead of trying to explain it as a short scale inheritable phenomenon, the might have had a really great argument.
(Yes, I am in the 90% who are skeptical about this, without further evidence and perhaps a demo).
Almost everything you can summarise in a line is bollocks news headlines. Science is, unfortunately, a lot more complicated than that.
We (probably) use all our brain. Just not all on conscious intellectual thought. It's not hard to see that - cut into the brain and you ALWAYS lose something, it just might not be immediately obvious what.
The appendix may well be a store of gut bacteria that reseeds the gut in the case of illness. Which kinda makes sense, the same way you save some of the cheese by-products to help make the next cheese. And also explains why when it blows it's quite so serious - it's basically an inactive mini-gut getting infected and exploding.
It's just that it's hard to prove these things definitively because they were never DESIGNED to do that. They just happen to do so. And so they may be doing ten jobs well or one job badly or no jobs at all and it's incredibly difficult to say which for a global population at any static point in time.
Similarly "junk" DNA is as it says - noncoding. We think. But it might be doing other stuff. Hell, it may just be purely structural, or it may be remnants of old coding, or it may just have got mixed in the same way you accidentally mix in insects into basically every foodstuff you eat (yes, literally) but because it "just works" and nobody notices, it doesn't really matter.
Or, maybe, it's coding is not as simple as we expect. Nobody's every really SEEN things like DNA do their jobs. You can look at it, you can simulate it, but nobody really knows exactly what's going on in the millions of full strands inside a HUMONGOUS cell that replicates billions of times over in the space of a matter of months.
The problem is that science is so complicated that you can't understand it, and headlines are all you pick up. How many moons does the Earth have? Depending on which scientists you ask, and which definition of "moon" you use, it can be zero, one, two, twenty-seven or hundreds. Nothing is as simple as you can explain in one sentence. Or even one article. Or even one research study and paper. Or even one field of expertise.