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If people had wings and could fly it would be considered exercise and nobody would do it.
Americans wouldn’t do it, the rest of the world would
I was about to be offended and then I remembered how I got out of breath walking up the stairs this morning. (To be fair, I’m anemic af and almost certainly have a touch of long covid, but still.)
Yes. Burgerlanders are very averse to any level of self improvement that might be difficult. I blame the car culture propaganda more than I blame the people though.
Yeah one time I traveled to Europe and everyone was just running everywhere. Very efficient.
I’m good on the feathers I read the goosebumps book about learning to fly and it gave me a preview of my trypophobia when R.L. Stine described the feathers growing out of the main characters skin
I’ll hold off too because some feathers grow straight from the bones. Eek
I on the other hand am all that is man and will be taking the feathers because I want to look fabulous
MF walking one way into getting a pile of teratomas
What does that even mean, you have like “four letters” and dna strands of millions long. Like how selective do you have to be. I’m sure you can basically write anything that way.
Are there entire chunks that are inactive that would give feathers, that at some point gave feathers to our ancestors?
All things DNA is full of code that doesn’t get activated and is just passed on anyways
Gene expression is what they mean by “activated”
Basically think of it like having a library of instruction books and only grabbing a few of them to do the project that needs done.
DNA contains coding and control regions. Changes to the coding regions are rare, most of the evolutionary stuff is happening within those control regions instead. Mutations there are more likely to result in interesting effects by affecting the way genes activate and interact, while the coding regions do the heavy lifting.
Losing some feature could be as simple as a mutation that permanently switches off the control region of a gene, even if the gene itself and the interactions formerly coded around it still work. Over time, those accumulate mutations and degrade, since they are not useful and therefore evolution doesn’t preserve them, but they are still there. For example, we have an inactivated gene that used to make an enzyme that would break down uric acid. So we get gout, but our ancestors didn’t.
I agree, this seems pretty misleading. And are there any other feathered animals other than on the dinosaur branch? Because if not, how should the feather DNA even end up in mammalian DNA?? Or maybe feathers are produced by very common differently used genes? But in this case this would be even more nonsensical…
Stunning creatures, sea lions.
Wonderful plumage.
Fierce Creatures (1997)
I want the damn feathers for the social aspect! If we were allowed to preen each other, the world would be a better place!
TIL evolution is bad at deleting legacy code
We just comment it out in case we ever need it again.
Quick someone get CRSIPR therapy
Now go into a forrest with flint and boom
infinite ammo
