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GHOST IN THE MACHINE. "The secret of complex life lies in the chimeric nature of the eukaryotic cell—a hopeful monster, born in an improbable merger 2000 million years ago, an event still frozen in our innermost constitution and dominating our lives today." A profound truth. http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

PHANTASMAL DNA. "TEs are parasitic DNAs whose only function is to replicate and propagate themselves. When a transposon invades a new host, it must colonize the germline genome to persist in the population. Then, it will increase in copy number, and persists in the genome until, by vertical inactivation, all transposon copies become inactive and remain only as fossils." (TE = transposable elements). https://lnkd.in/eKngvkU View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this meditation on imperfection in nature, a reflection of the processes of the random forces of evolution, and the multitude of accommodations and work-arounds that resulted. This perspective turns on its head centuries of thinking that assumed a march towards ever increasing perfection. Living things are a weird hacked menagerie of hybrid parts cobbled together on the fly. View in LinkedIn

VESTIGIAL EAR. Humans have a Neanderthal-like inner ear, it was recently found. A messy situation simply got worse. https://lnkd.in/dXSe7HJ View in LinkedIn

BIG MESS. "You can really think of the human genome as the epitome of an unintelligent design. It's the biggest mess of a genome." (Lynch) https://lnkd.in/dwDevSE View in LinkedIn

ACCUMULATED DROSS. "The understanding that evolution is an inherently messy and inefficient process that often produces junk. This junk may be retained if it's not causing trouble." https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/three-reasons-to-like-junk-dna/ View in LinkedIn

JUNK DNA. "The reason why most of these useless pieces have not been weeded out is simply because there was no need to. We should remember that evolution does not work toward a best possible outcome, it can only do the best with what it already has. It's too much of a risk and too much work to get rid of all these defective and non-functional sequences if they aren't a burden; the work of simply duplicating these sequences is much lesser than that of getting rid of them." https://lnkd.in/dmueWnQ View in LinkedIn

MYTHS OF EVOLUTION: "Natural selection involves organisms trying to adapt." https://lnkd.in/d9kiUUZ View in LinkedIn

THE OPPOSITE OF INTELLIGENT. "These dreadful exhibits are the undeniable proof of evolution, linking present species with their ancestors in the clearest of ways. From Darwin to the present, the existence of bad, sinister, unintelligent design has provided powerful evidence that species were not created in their present forms but must have evolved over time—and evolved in such a way that the designs we encounter in ourselves and other species today are often the opposite of intelligent." https://lnkd.in/d8JdtZG View in LinkedIn

MYTHS OF EVOLUTION: "Species are distinct natural entities, with a clear definition, that can be easily recognized by anyone." https://lnkd.in/d9kiUUZ View in LinkedIn