Dread Pirate Roberts
Likewise. I'm quite a vocal atheist, but stuff like this... well, it makes me wonder if life IS an invention of something much stranger. It's just almost too intense to imagine this kind of stuff just starting to work, even if over millions of years. Not saying a god, but like an intelligence or something outside of our understanding..... like we're a lab project or something...

I'll shut up now.

Johnny Madhouse
Actually, the more you study this, the less an intelligent being seems plausible. It's all very slapdash, and evolution hasn't really PERFECTED anything so much as it has made things GOOD ENOUGH. Much of the genome isn't even ever transcribed into proteins, and in fact only survives because it is very good at repeating itself and injecting into new zones of DNA.

I would recommend The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It's a good book about the chaotic chemical evolution that drives biological evolution, and it is written for fairly smart people who don't have a lot of biology background.

Here's a fun bit of math! With six feet (or for this calculation, 2 meters) of DNA in every cell, and approximately 10^13 cells in the human body, the total length of DNA in the human body is about 2x10^13 meters. This is the equivalent of about 134 astronomical units, or about 66 round trips from the earth to the sun and back.

Most of that DNA is useless.

Johnny Madhouse
I should say, the less an intelligent CREATOR seems plausible or necessary. My sense of wonder is piqued regardless, though. Life is cool enough without an outside director.

Frank Rizzo
how do they work?