
With ‘Downsized’ DNA, Flowering Plants Took Over the World - sohkamyung
https://www.quantamagazine.org/with-downsized-dna-flowering-plants-took-over-the-world-20180111/
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WillReplyfFood
Imagine a species with a version controll system in there DNA. What epigenetic
wonders it would allow for - to revert forward, backward- or fast forward to a
diffrent branch.

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gumby
We sort of have that, though it’s like the age of development before revision
control. Old versions of code are still lying around and are sometime
activated via epigenetic triggers if they can be found.

This is why I was so annoyed when “the” genome was first sequenced: they saved
time by disregarding the “junk dna” — cargo cultism at its finest!

This mechanism isn’t terrible btw — your environment is likely to be quite
similar to recent environments; how often do you really go back and extract a
git revision from a year ago?

Also humans have an additional more powerful mechanism, memes, to supplement
genes.

