… that the human race was shaped by “an evolutionary arms race” with itself?
Their findings, published September 28 in Nature, show that over evolutionary time, primate genomes have undergone repeated episodes in which mutations in jumping genes allowed them to escape repression, which drove the evolution of new repressor genes, and so on. Furthermore, their findings suggest that repressor genes that originally evolved to shut down jumping genes have since come to play other regulatory roles in the genome.
“We have basically the same 20,000 protein-coding genes as a frog, yet our genome is much more complicated, with more layers of gene regulation. This study helps explain how that came about,” said Sofie Salama, a research associate at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute who led the study. More.
Well, yeah. And there’s about the same amount of metal in a top of the line computer as there is in 100 empty cat food tins.
The difference is the amount of design involved. The purposes intended, and all that. But they aren’t supposed to (and don’t) get into that.
See also: Human origins: The war of trivial explanations
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