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herewiss13Reading "The Tears of the Cheetah" about genetics and conservation, I was struck by an idea so simple that it's either brilliant or deeply, deeply flawed.
You have a sniper in a bell tower and 100 people in the courtyard below. Each of the sniper's shots is randomly selected and will kill a person.
Now, along with those 100 people, add 900 lifelike dummies. While each sniper shot still connects with a body, the odds of anyone dying drop dramatically. They don't dissapear, but 9 shots out of 10 ought to harmlessly hit dummies rather than people.
The sniper is any environmental mutagenic influence: radiation, chemical, whatever. The people are genes. The dummies are junk DNA.
Mutation doesn't see any difference between useful DNA and Junk DNA. It strikes a particular base pair at random.
The more useless base pairs you have, the more likely the useful genes will be spared and the organism will survive the mutagenic episode unscathed. Evolution may require mutation, but it's not in the best interest of any particular individual genome.
There's obviously an efficiency issue creating an upper limit on how much chaff the nucleus can sustain...but I can't help but think the idea of buffer DNA seems very elegant.
Which probably just demonstrates an ignorance about statistics on my part.
Comments? Critiques? Nobels?
You have a sniper in a bell tower and 100 people in the courtyard below. Each of the sniper's shots is randomly selected and will kill a person.
Now, along with those 100 people, add 900 lifelike dummies. While each sniper shot still connects with a body, the odds of anyone dying drop dramatically. They don't dissapear, but 9 shots out of 10 ought to harmlessly hit dummies rather than people.
The sniper is any environmental mutagenic influence: radiation, chemical, whatever. The people are genes. The dummies are junk DNA.
Mutation doesn't see any difference between useful DNA and Junk DNA. It strikes a particular base pair at random.
The more useless base pairs you have, the more likely the useful genes will be spared and the organism will survive the mutagenic episode unscathed. Evolution may require mutation, but it's not in the best interest of any particular individual genome.
There's obviously an efficiency issue creating an upper limit on how much chaff the nucleus can sustain...but I can't help but think the idea of buffer DNA seems very elegant.
Which probably just demonstrates an ignorance about statistics on my part.
Comments? Critiques? Nobels?
