Sandwalk

We may not know a lot about how artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms work but the one thing we do know is that they are only as good as t...

The expression of genes is regulated at many levels but one of the most important is regulation at the level of transcription. Transcription...

I recently reported that Google's AI program does a horrible job of summarizing the junk DNA controversy. [ The scary future of AI is re...

There is considerable controversy over the total number of genes in the human genome. The number of protein-coding genes is pretty well esta...

If you align similar regions of the human and chimpanzee genomes they turn out to be about 98.6% identical in nucleotide sequence. The total...

I'm giving a talk next Wednesday (October 1st) to the members of the Senior College (retired faculty). It's at the University of Tor...

This is a podcast in French on the topic of junk DNA. The moderator is Thomas C. Durand of La Tronche en Biais , a YouTube channel that focu...

The idea that most of the human genome is junk originated more that 50 years ago. Since then, evidence in support of this concept has steadi...

Lungfish are our closest living fish cousins. All living terrestrial vertebrates (e.g. amphibians, mammals, reptiles) descent from a common ...

Philip Ball believes that we are in the middle of a revolution in our way of thinking about how life works. His ideas are complex but part o...

Philip Ball is on a roll. He has published a new book plus several articles in popular magazines and he has appeared in a bunch of podcasts...

Zach Hancock is a postdoc in ecology & evoluvionary biology at the University of Michigan. He has a YouTube channel with several thousa...

Tom Cech won a Nobel Prize for discovering one example of a catalytic RNA. He recently published an article in the New York Times extolling...

The "All of Us Research Program" is an American effort to sequence one million genomes. The stated goal is to study human genetic ...

The phrase "dark matter of the genome" is used by scientists who are skeptical of junk DNA so they want to convey the impression t...

The Zoonomia project aligned the genome sequences of 240 mammalian species and determined that only 10.7% of the human genome is conserved. ...

The latest summary of the number of genes in the human genome gets the number of protein-coding genes correct but their estimate of the numb...

This chapter describes gene families in the human genome. I explain how new genes are born by gene duplication and how they die by deletion ...

Chapter 4: Why Don't Mutations Kill Us?

See Chapter 3: Repetitive DNA and Mobile Genetic Elements