Top all-time · #5897
<center>Sandwalk</center>
Personal blog · sandwalk.blogspot.comscience
<center>Sandwalk</center> is a personal blog at sandwalk.blogspot.com about science. Since 2012, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Larry Moran's blog on junk DNA, genome function, genetic drift and evolution. Commenters cite its posts as sources in threads on the genome, comets and sex, and point readers to it for the case that most of the genome is junk.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /2008/02/theme-genomes-junk-dna.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-02-26
What Hacker News says?
Personally I think the idea that life/prebiotic soup came to earth on a comet is suspect, for the reasons explained in these blog posts and the links therein: http://sandwalk.blogspot.ca/2011/11/nasa-confusion-about-ori... http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2009/04/can-watery-asteroids-ex... Two problems with the 'organic asteroid' theory are the 'racemization problem' (how to explain why life only uses L isomers rather t…
Comment linking /2009/04/can-watery-asteroids-explain-why-life.html
on “Rosetta Probe Discovers Organic Molecules on Comet”Submitted Evolution as Tinkering (2008) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionDespite your patronizing tone, I fear it may be you who is naive. I don't know what field it is that you've been in for the last 20 years, but I suggest you start reading up on genetics and biochemistry, as you've got a lot of catching up to do. In the meantime, here are a few questions for you to think about. You are already aware, of course, that 90% of the human genome is unconserved, that 50% of the genome consi…
Comment linking /2008/02/theme-genomes-junk-dna.html
on “DNA seen through the eyes of a coder”Submitted Everyone Is a Descendent of Charlemagne as a story · 1 points
HN discussionStill 90% junk. https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2011/05/whats-in-your-genome.h...
Comment linking /2011/05/whats-in-your-genome.html
on “Tiny fern has the largest genome of any organism on Earth”Submitted Where did your chicken come from? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou're refuting a strawman. The junk DNA claim is not, and as far as I can see never had been, that all non-coding DNA is junk. It's that most of our genome -- around 90% -- is junk[1][2]. But since the genome is over 98% non-coding, that implies that something like 8% is functional non-coding DNA, which is several times the amount of coding DNA. Finding small amounts of additional functional non-coding DNA does not…
Comment linking /2022/08/junk-dna-vs-noncoding-dna.html
on “RNA-targeting CRISPR reveals that noncoding RNAs are not 'junk'”Submitted The truth about ENCODE as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2018/03/whats-in-your-genome-p... We don't need 1M copies of Alu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alu_element A lot of the sequences are defective copies. These are often how new genes arise, but they are not useful to the individual.
Comment linking /2018/03/whats-in-your-genome-pie-chart.html
on “RNA-targeting CRISPR reveals that noncoding RNAs are not 'junk'”> genes that don't confer any particular advantage tend to peter out when inserted into large populations Not sure that's true. Natural selection is not the only force driving evolution. Neutral and nearly neutral (slightly deleterious) alleles can be fixed in a population by random genetic drift. Source: https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-importance-of-rando...
Comment linking /2020/10/on-importance-of-random-genetic-drift.html
on “Humans are more closely related than we commonly think”and large parts of our genome is bit-rotted and non functional Larry Moran has a lot of good material on this http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/theme-genomes-junk-dna....
Comment linking /2008/02/theme-genomes-junk-dna.html
on “Vitamin C is a bug that needs to be patched”While new discoveries of biological function are fascinating, I don't think it follows that we are overturning the idea of junk DNA (however the phrase was coined). More likely we are converging towards an understanding where most of the genome really is non-functional. Here's a recent accounting [1] of known function suggesting 90% is junk. I wonder how much this differs from our understanding of decades ago, it re…
Comment linking /2021/11/whats-in-your-genome-2021.html
on “RNA Takes Over”A lot of experts disagree with you that this is an open-and shut-question, including leaders in the field of population genetics. It is by no means so clear cut. Below I've linked a nice blog post on the question, as well as a Nature review from 2002 and even a Nature article from two weeks ago (Mar 2016). http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2014/03/everything-you-thought-... http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v3/n4/abs/nrg…
Comment linking /2014/03/everything-you-thought-you-knew-about.html
on “Sex Is a Coping Mechanism”I don't think this article gives the pro-"Junk DNA" arguments fair treatment. Check out Larry Moran's blog [1, 2] if you want to to hear the other side of the story. He maintains that most of the human genome IS junk, and I find his arguments compelling. [1] A representative article: https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2013/07/five-things-you-should... [2] Rabbit hole warning, all of his Junk DNA posts: https://sandwalk.b…
Comment linking /2008/02/theme-genomes-junk-dna.html
on “The Complex Truth About ‘Junk DNA’”No one is saying evolution is all random, only mostly random. Natural selection obviously plays a role in shaping the direction of individual mutations - deleterious ones get purged relatively quickly. When those are culled, the vast majority of mutations are neutral or nearly neutral. >Brute forcing the genome to something better is clearly possible, but if you converted all of the matter in the visible universe in…
Comment linking /2019/09/contingency-selection-and-long-term.html
on ““Dark” Personalities Are More Likely to Signal Victimhood”Here's a handy tip you won't find often on HN: any time you're wondering whether X is "an evolutionary adaptation", where X is "any complex phenotype that isn't a genetic disease", the answer is very probably no . Most of our evolution is accidental, because the dominant evolutionary process is genetic drift [0]. There are exceptions to this rule but they have been usually very easy to demonstrate - natural selectio…
Comment linking /2019/08/evolution-by-accident.html
on ““Dark” Personalities Are More Likely to Signal Victimhood”Seems like there are much more intuitive ways to show these differences, something like the plot on Dr. Moran's blog: http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2012/01/whats-difference-betwee... Although the 3D plots are neat, they kind of feel like 3D barcharts: they add very little over a more straightforward representation (like a heatmap instead).
Comment linking /2012/01/whats-difference-between-human-and.html
on “Visualizing the Similarity of Human and Chimp DNA”