sometimes i love school
Omg, I feel so smart and official lol. We're analyzing speech patterns (specifically /ai/ monophthongization in the South), and I feel so... research-y and official with this program and actually doing real research stuff *excited*
So, my dilemma continues. I loooove linguistics. I was doing my readings, and they were long and convoluted, but I was really trying to dig deep into them and grasp and question what was being said, and thinking about it. It just really gets me interested and invested.
But then in my epigenetics class, I had a moment of pure AWE, where I was like... how can our genes do that? They have no mind of their own, it's a bunch of atoms and molecules and just chemical BLAH, yet it's 'smart' enough to create such a perfect, beautiful and complex, fool-proof system... and it's amazing, because evolutionarily I 'understand' how it happened... but it's still amazing that our bodies, our cells, know how to replicate and transcribe DNA. Here's a bit of what I mean:
To read DNA and then turn it into mRNA, which is what is going to tell the cell how to assemble the protein products it needs, a ton of protein molecules have to work together and assemble this giant 'machine' that reads/translates the DNA code. But how does the machine know WHICH of the many thousands of genes to pick from? How does it stop and start and just the right starting and stopping points? Well, there's a lot of systems - there's insulator proteins that attach to the 'activation site' of genes that should NEVER stop producing (because it's vital proteins that are being coded for) and some are attached to areas that at that moment should NOT be being produced (all the hormones that only work during puberty, for example). There's proteins that add a long string of useless RNA in order to keep the natural proteins doing their job at keeping things clean in the cell from degrading that RNA when it encounters it. There's complex signaling systems that activate and tell a cell to kill itself if something goes wrong in it (and when those mechanisms mutate, that's when you get cancer, for example). And it's just a beautifully complex system with so many back-up plans, and it's so EFFICIENT. and just. guh. It's beautiful.
So... you see my dilemma is not solved? D: D: D: