3 ms·

One has to wonder: is PAI-1 a feature or a bug?

• saalweachter 9y ago
  There are two things that make this question very difficult to answer. The first is that our genetic code is spaghetti code beyond the dreams of the most cowboy of the 70's cowboy assembly programmers. Our genes and proteins are reused in different ways at different times in different cells in ways that make it difficult to unequivocally call a gene "good" or "bad". The second is that even evaluating along the simple "does it make things survive and reproduce better?" evolutionary metric, you still need to consider the exact, current environment a gene is being evaluated in; a gene can be harmful today and beneficial yesterday, or vice versa. Maybe the gene confers an immunity to a virulent, deadly, extinct disease; maybe it was necessary when another gene was present, a gene which has since changed. Evolution isn't particularly fast, most of the time; any given organism will be adapted to a smear of their environments as they existed over the last few million years, and not perfectly adapted to any of them (unless their environment has remained static).
  • Danihan 9y ago
    Excellently put. Good or bad all depends on context and context (via ever-changing environmental pressures) has changed about a billion times during our long, winding path towards becoming modern homo-sapiens.
• twobyfour 9y ago
  It may depend on what era you live in and how liable you are to encounter starvation.