Embrace your inner fish

[pokerfan]

Jerry Coyne via Richard Dawkins: No, this isn’t about Neil Shubin’s wonderful book about fossils, fishes, and evolutionary remnants, but a an article by Dr. Michael Mosley on, oddly, the BBC News “health” page. You must see it, if only to watch the 30-second time-lapse video (made from high-quality scans) of the development of the embryonic human face up to ten weeks. As Mosley explains (and the video shows), our fishy ancestry explains that curious groove between our nose and upper lip, the philtrum. Have you ever wondered why it’s there? It doesn’t have any obvious adaptive function. It’s an evolutionary remnant.



http://richarddawkins.net/articles/623938-our-inner-fishes

Direct link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFY_KPFS3LA

[Ian David]

1. I think I remember reading about this on alt.sex.fetish.philtrum. n/t

[Curmudgeoness]

2. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

i.e., an organism in the course of its development goes through the same successive stages (in abbreviated form) as did the species in its evolutionary development

[HysteryDiagnosis]

3. Interestingly enough....

Them Cubans, always picking at things better left alone.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19607845


Math Biosci. 2009 Sep;221(1):60-76. Epub 2009 Jul 14.
An algebraic hypothesis about the primeval genetic code architecture.
Sánchez R, Grau R.
Source

Research Institute of Tropical Roots, Tuber Crops and Plantains (INIVIT), Biotechnology Group, Villa Clara, Cuba.
Abstract

A plausible architecture of an ancient genetic code is derived from an extended base triplet vector space over the Galois field of the extended base alphabet {D,A,C,G,U}, where symbol D represents one or more hypothetical bases with unspecific pairings. We hypothesized that the high degeneration of a primeval genetic code with five bases and the gradual origin and improvement of a primeval DNA repair system could make possible the transition from ancient to modern genetic codes.

Our results suggest that the Watson-Crick base pairing G identical with C and A=U and the non-specific base pairing of the hypothetical ancestral base D used to define the sum and product operations are enough features to determine the coding constraints of the primeval and the modern genetic code, as well as, the transition from the former to the latter. Geometrical and algebraic properties of this vector space reveal that the present codon assignment of the standard genetic code could be induced from a primeval codon assignment.

Besides, the Fourier spectrum of the extended DNA genome sequences derived from the multiple sequence alignment suggests that the called period-3 property of the present coding DNA sequences could also exist in the ancient coding DNA sequences.

The phylogenetic analyses achieved with metrics defined in the N-dimensional vector space (B(3))(N) of DNA sequences and with the new evolutionary model presented here also suggest that an ancient DNA coding sequence with five or more bases does not contradict the expected evolutionary history.

PMID:
19607845

[musette_sf]

4. I wish, I wish, I wish I was a fish

Cos fishes have a better life than people

[HysteryDiagnosis]

5. Interestingly enough

http://www.urzeitcode.com/index.php?id=19

Title of the lecture of Daniel M. Ebner, Switzerland, at the "World Mysteries Forum" 2008 in Basel:
"Primeval Code" - reactivated!

Can the global food problem at last be solved without using genetic engineering? This new book by Swiss journalist Luc Bürgin unveils the secret of a sensational biological discovery at the pharmaceutical giant Ciba (now Novartis), which unfortunately has been ignored by the experts up to the present day. In laboratory experiments the researchers there Dr. Guido Ebner and Heinz Schürch exposed cereal seeds and fish eggs to an "electrostatic field" in other words, to a high voltage field, in which no current flows.

[TheMadMonk]

6. I know you can't shove much in 30 seconds. However,...

...that little vid suddenly made cleft pallates a lot more understandable to me.