Eight-legged evolution exploits editing
RNA tweaks adapt octopuses to water temperature
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/337413/title/Eight-legged_evolution_exploits_editing
This is quite interesting because, as the author states:
Researchers used to think that dialing down or amping up the activity of genes through DNA mutation was evolution’s main trick for fine-tuning the body’s machinery. But there’s a downside: Change the DNA and you can’t easily go back.
Already there is the area of research termed ‘epigenetics‘ that looks specifically at how non-mutation events (primarily being DNA methylation and in principle being reversible) can have dramatic influence (sometimes starting even in the womb!) on the actual patterns of gene expression of an organism, often for life (this helps explain the differences between identical twins, doanchano).
It is sometimes quite amazing to me how much our knowledge of genes and gene expression has evolved since I studied it in school 20-ish years ago. I remember interviewing at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI, something I thought would be the perfect job, sadly that was far from the case, though I did wind up putting in 7 years there) and being staggered to learn that the one-gene-per-stretch-of-DNA paradigm I had learned was totally obsolete as genes could go both directions on the DNA strand, they could overlap and they could result in different combinations of introns and exons. All barely conceivable when I studied it (this activity was only known (when I went to school) in mitochondria DNA and a few species of highly evolved microbes (like the one behind tuberculosis)).
This what I love so much about science! Every time you find out you have been wrong about something your understanding has to evolve (sometimes dramatically) to cope with the new information (unlike, say, the GOP where they simply ignore any new information if it is inconvenient to their chosen world view).
