DNA at 60; our ignorance (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, April 29, 2013, 20:05 (4227 days ago)
edited by unknown, Monday, April 29, 2013, 20:11

I may have published this before, but I can't find it, so here is the article again: what we don't know. how much is left to uncover abut the genome and how it works:-http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dna-at-60-still-much-to-learn-Found it on april 27th, but this is the complete article:-In short, the current picture of how and where evolution operates, and how this shapes genomes, is something of a mess. That should not be a criticism, but rather a vote of confidence in the healthy, dynamic state of molecular and evolutionary biology.
 
"A problem shared
 Barely a whisper of this vibrant debate reaches the public. Take evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' description in Prospect magazine last year of the gene as a replicator with "its own unique status as a unit of Darwinian selection". It conjures up the decades-old picture of a little, autonomous stretch of DNA intent on getting itself copied, with no hint that selection operates at all levels of the biological hierarchy, including at the supraorganismal level, or that the very idea of 'gene' has become problematic.
 
"Why this apparent reluctance to acknowledge the complexity? One roadblock may be sentimentality. Biology is so complicated that it may be deeply painful for some to relinquish the promise of an elegant core mechanism. In cosmology, a single, shattering fact (the Universe's accelerating expansion) cleanly rewrote the narrative. But in molecular evolution, old arguments, for instance about the importance of natural selection and random drift in driving genetic change, are now colliding with questions about non-coding RNA, epigenetics and genomic network theory. It is not yet clear which new story to tell."