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DNA 'Knockouts' Reveal Genes Humans Don't Need (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: Although humans have about 20,000 genes, exactly what most of them do inside our body's cells is still murky. One way to learn more is to find people who lack a working copy of a particular gene and see how that affects their health. Such so-called knockouts are scarce in the general population. But a new study points to a more efficient way to find them: Search the DNA of people from a culture in which marrying a relative is common. The study has found a number of genes that we seemingly can do without, including those thought to prevent serious diseases. And one healthy mother completely lacked a gene called PRDM9 that is involved in shuffling chromosomes during the formation of eggs and sperm. Mice lacking the gene are sterile.
Our genome is spaghetti code of the worst kind. If God exists, he is horrible coder.
Looking at the genome (or our brain) to understand how it works is kindof like looking at the end result of a neural net or genetic algorithm. The millions of random mutations get the right result based on the selection criteria (in this case survival). The animal world has plenty of extreme macroscopic examples of this whether it is extremely painful reproduction, deadly reproduction, insane impractical appendages, it doesn't really matter as long as your generation "wins". Some AI scientists have tried to reverse engineer relatively simple code generated by genetic algorithms and have found stuff that as far as they can tell shouldn't even work but exploits some small loophole in either the code, the hardware, or the selection criteria. When I was in HS, I did some GA stuff that failed miserably at midnight because the bots were taking advantage of minor variations in the random number generator and those assumptions failed as soon as the day changed. Our genome is this times a million. The number of flukes, switchbacks, random hacks, and things that shouldn't work but manage to because of some other random mutation is probably mind-boggling.