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DNA: Celebrate the unknowns | Philip Ball

On the 60th anniversary of the double helix, we should admit that we don’t fully understand how evolution works at the molecular level, suggests Philip Ball.

This week’s diamond jubilee of the discovery of DNA’s molecular structure rightly celebrates how Francis Crick, James Watson and their collaborators launched the ‘genomic age’ by revealing how hereditary information is encoded in the double helix. Yet the conventional narrative — in which their 1953 Nature paper led inexorably to the Human Genome Project and the dawn of personalized medicine — is as misleading as the popular narrative of gene function itself, in which the DNA sequence is translated into proteins and ultimately into an organism’s observable characteristics, or phenotype.

Sixty years on, the very definition of ‘gene’ is hotly debated. We do not know what most of our DNA does, nor how, or to what extent it governs traits. In other words, we do not fully understand how evolution works at the molecular level.

That sounds to me like an extraordinarily exciting state of affairs, comparable perhaps to the disruptive discovery in cosmology in 1998 that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating rather than decelerating, as astronomers had believed since the late 1920s. Yet, while specialists debate what the latest findings mean, the rhetoric of popular discussions of DNA, genomics and evolution remains largely unchanged, and the public continues to be fed assurances that DNA is as solipsistic a blueprint as ever.

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the-star-stuff: The artist’s concept depicts Kepler-62e, a...

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:00:32 -0400

the-star-stuff:

The artist’s concept depicts Kepler-62e, a super-Earth planet in the habitable zone of a star smaller and cooler than the sun, located about 1,200 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra.

CREDIT: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

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Fri, 17 May 2013 10:00:43 -0400

byrontobofur: feyuca: Hawkgirl :D I’m in love with her on the...

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:00:43 -0400

byrontobofur:

feyuca:

Hawkgirl :D

I’m in love with her on the Justice League cartoon so I will reblog this

mennascope: She Hulk by Vincent Vernacatola

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:00:43 -0400

mennascope:

She Hulk by Vincent Vernacatola

twasmypieart: Artwork by kit-kit-kit

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:00:43 -0400

twasmypieart:

Artwork by kit-kit-kit

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Fri, 17 May 2013 10:00:43 -0400

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