Anomalocaris has always been one of my favorite Cambrian animals — it was so weird, and it was also the top predator of the age, making it the equivalent of T. rex. The anomalocarids were also a diverse and successful group, so wouldn’t you know it…it also had a distant filter-feeding cousin in the Ordovician. This is Aegirocassis benmoulae.
I’ve now read two novel attempts to explain the existence of junk DNA. To a lot of people, the very idea of junk DNA is offensive: whatever process built us, whether divine fiat or the razor-sharp honing of natural selection, must be powerful, omnipotent or nearly so, and incapable of tolerating any noise or sloppiness, especially not to the degree seen in the eukaryotic genome. There is no room for error in design.
There’s also a strong whiff of human exceptionalism. Look at us, we’re pretty much perfect! Or at least, movie stars and super-models are the pinnacle of creation/evolution. How can you even look at Scarlett Johansson or George Clooney and suggest that they are built of monkey bits and lizard leftovers, or that their manufacture was in any way slapdash?
So there’s an amazing fringe literature out there reaching desperately to find some excuse to justify every scrap of DNA, and especially every bit of human DNA, as purposeful. It sometimes gets weird.
This skink looks like it just burst out of someone’s chest, and in addition, it’s full of little baby skinks.
Then he waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.
A most excellent piece of work: Ryan Gregory is featured in this article on the ubiquity of junk DNA. Good explanations all around.
We had a blizzard this week. It’s bitterly cold right now. I was trying hard to think of good reasons to have left the Pacific Northwest, and this is about the only thing I came up with: Devil’s Club.
At 5pm Pacific time tonight, BlogTalkRadio will have a discussion between Alan Boyle, Seth Shostak, and Don Lincoln on Aliens! Shostak is the SETI guy, whose latest book is Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
According to Malcolm Gladwell, that means I can do open heart surgery! Any volunteers?
