4 ms·
As someone who likes to read about biology but only took a couple of classes in high school - isn't there a trope that we used to not understand what 90% of our
by stevenwoo 9y ago
As someone who likes to read about biology but only took a couple of classes in high school - isn't there a trope that we used to not understand what 90% of our DNA does and initially thought it was not used? The very simpler counterargument in my opinion was we don't understand 90% of what our DNA does.
- jfarlow 9y agoThere is such a trope - I wouldn't call it accurate. We're learning a lot very fast. But DNA (like most biology) is multi-modal and has roles at many different scales - from the scale of milliseconds to cellular lifetimes, to organismal lifetimes to species' lifetimes, from coding proteins, to regulating what codes proteins, to physical space, to more. There's a lot to learn, but we also know a lot. To me it seems more like a nice middle ground right now - enough to get a truly solid toehold, but also much more to go :)