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Re: A human genome has finally, fully been decoded

By: Cactus Flower in ALEA | Recommend this post (0)
Fri, 01 Apr 22 10:12 AM | 26 view(s)
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Msg. 45194 of 54959
(This msg. is a reply to 45190 by fizzy)

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May I add my penny's worth, which is the same point from a different perspective.

It is the nature of the perimeter of knowledge that as it expands we become aware of more that we don't know. So as the extent of our wisdom expands, the zone of our ignorance does likewise. And that will never not be true.

It's rather like those space telescopes. In ancient times, astronomers could see the celestial bodies that were visible with their eyes: so the Babylonians tracked Venus, the Unetica culture watched the Pleiades, the Maltese the Golden Gate of the Ecliptic and the Egyptians Sirius and they did clever things like building calendars around them for farming purposes. That was impressive stuff. But we see so much more in the landscape of the stars now using orbiting telescopes and all of it generates knowledge about the shape and age of the universe, and so on. And so we also have trillions of new questions about what the heck is going on out there.

When we learn everything we can about the genome, there will be massively more we don't know too. So we can be gathering knowledge and improving skills - even developing scientific laws - at the same time that we realise how little we know compared to the newly expanded whole.




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The above is a reply to the following message:
Re: A human genome has finally, fully been decoded
By: fizzy
in ALEA
Fri, 01 Apr 22 1:21 AM
Msg. 45190 of 54959

Clo, this is a major feat.

But it still needs to be put into perspective. We know ALMOST NOTHING about what the vast majority of the genes do, even generally, and when you get into specifics...well, I don't know what the right comparison would be but I'm going to take a wild stab and say we understand ourselves perhaps not much more than you would understand the entire ocean, and ocean floor, by sampling a drop of seawater.


Chimps are 98.8% genetically similar[to humans], making them one of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom The genetic similarity between humans and fruit flies [AND BANANAS!] is 60% Comparing Human Genetic Similarity to Other Life Forms Of the three billion genetic building blocks that make us living things, only a handful are uniquely ours.
http://www.visualcapitalist.com/comparing-genetic-similarities-of-various-life-forms/

With that in mind, can you IMAGINE the arrogance it would take to look at a Chimp and say "I understand all but 1.2% of the average human? And we DON'T understand really *anything* about chimpanzees, either, by the way.

Just a few decades back they used to look at human DNA and call the vast majority of it "junk", because it APPEARED to have no useful function.

Since then epigenetics has revealed that much of this "junk" is epigenetic, which means it ONLY gets triggered to action under unusual environmental conditions. The "junk" is sort of the wisdom of 6 billion years on tap -- for extraordinary environmental, disease, or (especially in the case of humans) 'stress' conditions.

Further, your mitochondria carry their OWN genetic code. Which we really don't understand scarcely at all.

And ALL of this genetic code MOSTLY acts through directing construction of a massive numbe of proteins. And we probably understand less about that then we do about the DNA itself. And then you get into protein INTERACTIONS, which opens up a whole different realm, of which we are grossly, grossly, grossly IGNORANT.

And THEN you get into the emerging - and therefore controversial field - cell to cell communications. The cells in your brain and the cells in your toenail, or your muscles, or your reproductive cells carry EXACTLY the same genome. But if a doctor suggested that clipping your toenail and clipping your brain were approximately equivalent, you would know s/he a complete imbecile, regardless of degree.

Humankind has figured out a lot of things, but what we don't know, dwarves what we know. And our arrogance about the whole of what constitutes humanity (not to mention the greater ecosystem and ecosystems of ecosystems) dwarves all.

We are like the town idiot, reveling in how clever we are to be able to now tie our shoelaces correctly. Sometimes.

It is in that context that I made most of my comments about the mRNA vaccines. We don't know what we are doing. Not even close, when you get down to the cellular level. We get lucky once in a long while. But one slip could absolutely be fatal for everyone and everything.

Consider the warning at the beginning of Jurassic Park: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3j9muCo4o0


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