I knew it! Back in the day (early 90’s), when I was studying biology, the word on the street was that the bulk of human DNA was “junk” filler, and probably nothing more. New research shows that all those boring repeating base pairs actually play an active role in gene expression. This is pretty awesome.
It also fits with my whole tenet about how very little we actually know about biological systems, despite what many scientists might purport. There are orders of magnitude more variables at play than we even realize, and incalculable permutations of interactions across the board. This is one of the things I absolutely love about biology — we barely know anything! (Yes, we do know quite a lot, but we’re barely scratching the surface, especially compared to many other natural sciences, save maybe cosmology.)
Science rocks!
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