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Gabrielle Martinez                                                                                                         2/5/07

Tornabene-Per. 7                                                                                                          CHG

Ridley’s Genome “Self-Interest”

1. The genome is broken up into many different sections or “paragraphs” of information that are called “exons.” In between these exons are “introns,” or a large group of nonsensical and irrelevant information. Ridley attributes the confusion of the human genome to the fact that it almost like a book that has written itself and has added, deleted, and modified information within it over the course of 4 billion+ years. The genome is prone to parasitism and these parasitic spurts of information demand to be recopied over and over again, adding to the confusion.
2. Ridley mentions the “five copies of Ode to Joy” and the “instructions for how to saddle a horse” to analogize the useless information that can be found in the human genome. The “twenty-seven paragraphs interspersed with twenty-six pages of irrelevant junk” is an analogy to a book. A gene will be made up of tons and tons of information and only need a very small amount of that information.

              

1. Mother Nature’s “dirty little secret” is that genes are much more complicated than they should be. Mother Nature hides the useful information for each gene in the midst of multiple times more irrelevant information. This irrelevant information is actually real genes that are just completely different from and detrimental to the section of the genome encoding for a certain gene.
2. The email virus is an analogy for the genome because the person sending the virus is doing the same thing that a parasitic part of the genome would do. The person sending you the email tells you that by opening an email containing the word “marmalade” in it, you will get a computer virus so you should send the warning email to everyone you know. On the basis that this is not true, the person who is sending the email is the maker of the virus because the virus isn’t an actual computer virus, the virus is the fact that the person has tricked you into sending everyone the warning email, thus recopying it over and over again. You have spent time sending the warning email to everyone you know and have wasted your time.
3. “Junk DNA” or “Selfish DNA” are just sections of DNA that have never been transcribed into a recognizable language for a protein.