Ducks are dinosaurs: Ducks, as with all birds, evolved from theropods and are considered living dinosaurs.
Horses walk on middle fingers: Ancestors of modern horses have 5 toes the size of a small dog. Eventually they evolved away the other toes and only the middle toe remain.
Bees are crustaceans: Crustacea is not a single branch in the tree of life but a collection of multiple branches (i.e. paraphyletic). If we pick a point and said everything after that is considered the same group, then by necessity we have to put bees (and all hexapoda) and what we traditionally call crustaceans into a single group. That group would be pancrustacea. Is that exactly the same as saying bees are crustaceans? Are jackdaws crows? I’ll let you decide.
Pterodactyls are fish: Fish is also not a single branch. By the same token, if we want to put what we traditionally counted as fish (such as sharks, carps, and lungfishes) together as a single group, we have to include all vertebrates (which includes pterodactyls, us, whales, etc.)
Redwood are algae: I’m not too sure about this one. The wikipedia page for algae say that it excludes the land plants (embryophytes) which redwoods are part of.
Humans are part virus: Viruses have the ability inject and splice their genetic material into our genome and have our cells do the cloning for them. Usually it is not passed on to the next generation. Apparently an ancient strain of virus from millions of years ago incorporated themselves into our genome and our germ cells (sperm and egg) and can be passed on to the next generation.
Everything is virus: one of the theories of how cells went from RNA to DNA is viruses.
Forterre (2006) proposed that early cellular lineages diversified while still harboring RNA genomes, with viruses and cells coexisting from the beginning. In his model, the first fixation of DNA occurred in viruses, which subsequently transferred the enzymes necessary for DNA synthesis and maintenance into independent cellular lineages. Thus, RNA genomes in ancestral cells were converted into DNA genomes via viral intermediates (Forterre, 2002, 2006). The structural and functional differences among cellular replication systems would then reflect the independent viral origins of DNA replication machinery.
The latest puzzle: what the viroids doin’ in our guts? Nobody knows, we are only just realised they are widespread and not exclusive to flowers or whatever Anton told me. Tiny simple RNA smudges that are too simple to even qualify as a virus.
I feel like they’re as close to abiogenesis as we’ll ever get, with these living fossils.
My attempt at an explanation
Ducks are dinosaurs: Ducks, as with all birds, evolved from theropods and are considered living dinosaurs.
Horses walk on middle fingers: Ancestors of modern horses have 5 toes the size of a small dog. Eventually they evolved away the other toes and only the middle toe remain.
Bees are crustaceans: Crustacea is not a single branch in the tree of life but a collection of multiple branches (i.e. paraphyletic). If we pick a point and said everything after that is considered the same group, then by necessity we have to put bees (and all hexapoda) and what we traditionally call crustaceans into a single group. That group would be pancrustacea. Is that exactly the same as saying bees are crustaceans? Are jackdaws crows? I’ll let you decide.
Pterodactyls are fish: Fish is also not a single branch. By the same token, if we want to put what we traditionally counted as fish (such as sharks, carps, and lungfishes) together as a single group, we have to include all vertebrates (which includes pterodactyls, us, whales, etc.)
Redwood are algae: I’m not too sure about this one. The wikipedia page for algae say that it excludes the land plants (embryophytes) which redwoods are part of.
Humans are part virus: Viruses have the ability inject and splice their genetic material into our genome and have our cells do the cloning for them. Usually it is not passed on to the next generation. Apparently an ancient strain of virus from millions of years ago incorporated themselves into our genome and our germ cells (sperm and egg) and can be passed on to the next generation.
Damn, how did the horse ancestors walk with toes the size of small dogs?
not just one. 5-8% of the human genome comes from viruses
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus just in case anyone wants a search term
And provides fertile ground for evolution by providing space for gene duplication and divergence. Likely also for miRNA control systems.
That explains a lot.
Everything is virus: one of the theories of how cells went from RNA to DNA is viruses.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0303264725002813
The latest puzzle: what the viroids doin’ in our guts? Nobody knows, we are only just realised they are widespread and not exclusive to flowers or whatever Anton told me. Tiny simple RNA smudges that are too simple to even qualify as a virus.
I feel like they’re as close to abiogenesis as we’ll ever get, with these living fossils.