Thursday, January 17, 2008

A Junk DNA Quiz

 
Take the junk DNA quiz in the left sidebar to let me know what you think of your genome. How much of it could be removed without affecting our species in any significant1 way in terms of viability and reproduction? Or even in terms of significant ability to evolve in the future? In other words, how much is junk?


1. I did not choose the word "significant" in order to be obtuse. I picked it in order to eliminate some trivial possibilities that really don't make any difference. For example, no matter how little DNA you delete you would be able to detect some change, even if it's just a reduction in the time to replicate the genome of the amount of energy used. If you think that such changes are "significant" then you should answer "none" to the question in the quiz.

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