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Do junk DNA is like code styling and comments in programming.

• meowkit 5y ago
  Its closer to a config file / internal functions that modify the state variables of a system instead of generating objects. The junk DNA doesn't explicitly get read, but it interacts in nonlinear ways with the executable "text" portion of the DNA. Also disclaimer: My only knowledge of this is from Nessa Carey's The Epigenetics Revolution and some additional online reading.
  • pas 5y ago
    Or, more like Makefiles, and an enormous amount of cache for the runtime and build system, but this cache never really gets invalidated. Basically it's like using a "buggy filesystem" (like ext2) that only shows the first ~16000 files in a directory. So having too much junk can hide stuff, having too little of it can uncover files that evolution carefully hid, and so on.
  • robwwilliams 5y ago
    No, this is the wrong metaphor. You want the right metaphor: one brilliant coder, 10 total newbie coders, and five cats walking all over the key boards. And no delete function at all!
  • sterlind 5y ago
    depends on what you consider non-coding, too. the ribosome is mostly made of RNA, but it's not turned into a protein. if your ribosome breaks you can't make proteins.
• asdff 5y ago
  Imagine copying and pasting random junks of code from around stack overflow into your script and commenting it all out, thats kinda a better analogy. 20 lines there, 400 lines in reverse over there. Sometimes they get uncommented in cancers.