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> and just plain unnecessary stuff I'd like to point out that any protein that is produced takes up precious resources. Our evolutionary intuition suggests tha
by f6v 5y ago
> and just plain unnecessary stuff
I'd like to point out that any protein that is produced takes up precious resources. Our evolutionary intuition suggests that unnecessary things should be dropped from the genome.
Suppose a protein is unnecessary. Then there would be no evolutionary pressure to keep it from mutating and loosing its function(and mutations happen all the time!). The organisms would just gradually loose it to mutations and we wouldn't find a conserved protein throughout eucaryotes. So there must be something keeping it.
- dash2 5y agoCould it be a genetic parasite?
- BBC-vs-neolibs 5y agoDoesn't that go just a turtle deeper?
- f6v 5y agoThe genome is full of retrovirus remnants, so there’s a way for a parasite to piggyback on the host genome. Alu repeats in human genome are one such example. But there’s a hypothesis that these get “domesticated” by the genome and start serving a function.
- quotemstr 5y agoOne conserved over the whole tree of life? That's like imagining an editing bug that Emacs and Vim have both carefully and inexplicably preserved from the last universal common text editor.