Re: Darwin and DNA
I'm very skeptical. I'll give you a few reasons.
1. You need a direct lineage to hold onto a genetic lineage. Are nearest common ancester with dogs was much longer ago than that with chimps. Once there's a split, genetics alone can't hold onto this information unless there's something Lamarckian or absolutely revolutionary in genetics that has gone down and I missed it.
2. It sounds like some new agey BS to make us respect animals more. Sounds like the idea came before the evidence.
3. Nature abhors waste as a general rule. Specialization seems to be more useful than something akin to the backward compatability of windows 98 with windows 3.1. So, I doubt a bunch of those introns have all this latent potential encoded in them.
It's a compelling idea and I'm interested in the book, but I have serious doubts.
Even if there's some theory that intron DNA isn't just a bunch of junk and some regulatory genes and structurally useful DNA, I would prefer to have enough data to support this theory that there are review articles with a meta-analysis confirming this idea is likely. A couple papers along this line are not enough.
I have a friend doing post-doctoral work in genetics that I'll talk with about this idea as he keeps current in the field.
How is the referencing in the back of the book? Does it cite a lot of scientific literature from journals like Science, Nature, PNAS, Cell Genetics, etc. (I realize that the first two have fallen out of favor to some extent over the last few years)?
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