CODING THE FIRST ANIMAL

Our new scientific tools, which include strategies for thinking which includes a new demand for precision and definition, plus our insistence on knowing everything and possibly controlling everything, all contribute to the claim that a certain set of genes (no information about how many strands of chromosomes they are arranged on) represent the code for the first “animal”.

• a living organism that feeds on organic matter, typically having specialized sense organs and nervous system and able to respond rapidly to stimuli.

• any member of the kingdom of living things (as earthworms, crabs, birds, and people) that differ from plants typically in being able to move about, in not having cell walls made of cellulose, and in depending on plants and other animals as sources of food.

• any member of the kingdom Animalia, comprising multicellular organisms that have a well-defined shape and usually limited growth, can move voluntarily, actively acquire food and digest it internally, and have sensory and nervous systems that allow them to respond rapidly to stimuli: some classification schemes also include protozoa and certain other single-celled eukaryotes that have motility and animal-like nutritional modes.

• With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, are able to move, reproduce sexually, and grow from a hollow sphere of cells, the blastula, during embryonic development.

https://theconversation.com/we-reconstructed-the-genome-of-the-first-animal-95900  This research comes from the UK.

Presumably, the scientists were working from a check list that includes at least some of the above characteristics.  There would either be a designated gene or web of interacting genes that stipulate things like breathing oxygen, having sex, and knowing what’s going on.  Some of these definitions specifically exclude humans from the category of “animal”.  Presumably they also exclude angels, but this is not stipulated since we don’t mix science and fantasy.  By now most people recognize that humans are animals, as were all their preceding hominins.

Long ago I read a science fiction story about a people who had green blood because the molecules that carried energy around their systems was evolved from the chlorophyll in plants.  Why are earth animals using an iron molecule that can catch oxygen from air in lungs and carry it to the system of cells that is a human body?  Maybe that’s related to the origin of proto-animals in sea water.  We’re really water babies.

Presumably all genes are double — a double helix — at least in animals.  Vagrant genes, which are only code molecules, seem to wander at will and are free in things like sea water where they don’t need to be separated by a skin from the matrix of liquid.  Genes wandering around outside cells are called viruses.  If they are hostile to living beings, they are considered diseases, which impels our desire to identify, understand and control them.

https://theconversation.com/we-reconstructed-the-genome-of-the-first-animal-95900

From the article linked above:

• Our results suggest the genomes of the first animals were surprisingly similar to those of modern ones, containing the same proportions of biological functions. Around 55% of modern human genes descend from genes found in the last common ancestor of all animals, meaning the other 45% evolved later.

• We discovered the first animal had an exceptional number of novel genes, four times more than other ancestors. This means the evolution of animals was driven by a burst of new genes not seen in the evolution of their unicellular ancestors.

• Natural selection should mean that animals keep genes with essential biological functions as the species evolve. We found 25 groups of such genes that had been kept in this way, five times more genes than in other, older, ancestors. Most of them have never been associated with the origin of animals before.

• Three groups of these genes are involved in transmitting different nervous system signals. But our analyses show that these genes are also found in animals that do not have a nervous system, such as sponges. That means the genetic basis of the nervous system may have evolved before the nervous system itself did.

Forget the old chicken/egg puzzle:  first came the code.  The proper question is “what change in code made a dinosaur into poultry”?  I suppose then one might ask whether a dinosaur tasted like chicken or whether a genetic change made chicken edible?  

If code came first, with its remarkable ability to create intricate symphonies out of four molecular notes, then the plasticity of living things — their capacity to change and invent — is all the more remarkable.  At a slightly different webside  https://theconversation.com/us/topics/genes-3429 I find a host of fascinating ideas.  

Until now, one molecule meant one function — that molecules don’t multitask, so you might have to add the same gene to do something new.  But now we find that prions arise when molecules are folded differently.  Same bits put into new patterns.  Could this be a way to end disease-causing genes?  Maybe.  At the very least, since retroviruses are genes inserted into human chromosomes, we might pull them back out or tinker them into being something else.

https://theconversation.com/survival-gene-could-hold-key-to-hiv-treatment-11028

• A gene responsible for initiating immune response could have implications for treatment of chronic infections such as HIV.

• The newly discovered Arih2 gene makes decisions about whether to initiate immune response to infection, or switch it off to suppress chronic inflammation or autoimmunity.

• Scientists are now investigating how manipulating Arih2 can promote or suppress immune response.

• The discovery has implications for treatment of infections such as HIV, hepatitis, and tuberculosis, and chronic inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and sepsis.

There is a bevy of articles at this website that address HIV, both cure and control.  Most of them were written at places in the Southern Hemisphere because their politics and their pressing need both allow and demand it.  In the US we are not in the loop because it would not suit some dominant people.  What holds us back is not so much the deciphering of a fluid creative code based on four molecules and put into a double twist of connection, as it is our theory of society which is pretty much stuck in old conventions.  Those who benefit from the old ways work hard to prevent change and, since change is inevitable, there is damage to things both living and dead.

I am so pleased to have found this website:  “The Conversation”.