Re: [xml-dev] Sunday morning

On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 6:25 AM, Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@yahoo.de> wrote:

* The higher the organism, the greater the proportion of interrupted genes

"Never say 'higher' or 'lower'." --the notebooks of Charles Darwin

It looks as if the transition from single-level to two-level markup was a precondition for evolution beyond bacteria - as if it were an invention which increased the chances of creating meaningful sequences by many orders of magnitude.

The evidence, limited as it is, is the other way: that prokaryotic organisms *lost* introns in an attempt to optimize their genomes. The chloroplasts in plants, which are believed to be the descendants of cyanobacteria that were encapsulated long ago, have introns, which suggests that the common ancestor of all prokaryotes did too.

It's a mistake to think that evolution proceeds inexorably from simple to complex. Evolution is adaptation to local concerns, and has only local directionality.

GMail doesn't have rotating .sigs, but you can see mine at http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/signatures