[Paleopsych] conserved stuff in 'junk' DNA

Werbos, Dr. Paul J. paul.werbos at verizon.net
Sun Nov 28 16:19:18 UTC 2004


If the "junk" DNA is more highly conserved than the usual DNA...
that's important. It may suggest an interpretation a bit different from what
we have been drifting into.

Two alternative views of what that datum implies --

A conservative view might be that "what you see is what you get after all,"
and that the "junk DNA"... is like the glia cells in the brain, which people
think supply metabolic support to ALLOW neurons to play the decisive role 
everyone assumes...
could it be that the nonjunk DNA is as dominant as people have always 
thought, and that
the "junk DNA" is a kind of constant support system... evolved long,long 
ago and then frozen?
The paper you cited says the junk DNA is "highly conserved," but doesn't say
whether it is constant across all types of earth life, or just major groups.

A totally different view... "high conserved" could just mean slowly changing.
In multilayer time-lagged recurrent neural networks... we know we need to 
have slower
learning rates for stuff which is further away from direct empirical testing.
New categories of perception evolve more slowly than ... the formation
of memories using EXISTING categories, which can be "one-trial memories."



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