Book: The Violinist's Thumb

NoCoPilot wrote:

Yesterday I heard a recording on my classical online radio station that I just had to track down. It's called "Diabolus in Musica" and it's a bunch of virtuoso violin pieces by Niccoló Paganini.

Paganini is the violinist of the title of this collection of essays about genetics and inheritance. Turns out he probably had Marfan Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder (Lincoln also had it) which results in the afflicted people being extremely tall and thin and often double-jointed. Paganini could do things with his thumb on a violin that nobody previous, and nobody since, has been able to duplicate.

Slowly working my way through this collection.  The subject matter is interesting -- the origin of DNA and mitosis and mutation and how this codes for the vast variety of life -- but the author's style is not very engaging.  I keep setting it aside for something, anything(!) else to do.

It was written in 2012.  Yet the author still describes the non-protein coding DNA as "junk DNA" even though, in 2005, Sean Carroll solved the mystery of non-coding DNA in his book "Endless Forms Most Beautiful."  Still amazes me to see the earlier misinformation is still propagated everywhere.

Sam Kean wrote:

[Lynn] Margulis's theory has helped solve a profound mystery of life on earth: why evolution damn near stalled after such a promising beginning. The first organic molecules on earth [...] emerged in just a billion years, pretty speedy if you think about it. After this miracle however evolution flatlined: these microbes didn't evolve much more for well over a billion years -- and might never have.

What doomed them was energy consumption. Primitive microbes expend 2 percent of their total energy copying and maintaining DNA, but 75 percent of their energy making proteins. So even if a microbe develops the DNA for an advantageous evolutionary trait, actually building it pretty much depletes it. Adding two is out of the question. In these circumstances evolution idles.

Margulis's theory went like this. The first microbes on earth began swallowing and digesting others, Margulis's argued, and for some reason a large microbe ingested a smaller one one afternoon, and nothing happened. After untold generations, the little guy became really good at synthesizing high-octane fuel from oxygen, and [the bigger] cell lost its power-producing abilities and specialized instead in providing raw nutrients and shelter. This division of labor benefited each party, and soon neither party could survive without the other. We call the [smaller] cells our mitochondria, and they provided the fuel for all our subsequent evolution.

Picking it up again, after two loooooong biographies of Ben Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci.

DNA evidence says 200,000 years ago we developed a mutation that allowed our head hair to continue growing.  I'd never thought about it before, but is there any other species whose hair growth continues unabated their entire life?

Yaks?  Wooly mammoths?

I wonder what possible evolutionary advantage caused this mutation to become universal in humankind?  

Well, except Yul Brynner.