The Passing Process Once Again!

Unpleasant_(interface)_design

All I have are grunts and underlings :/

As new regulations coming into effect December 31st stipulate that a boss must have at least two (2) goons, minions, and/or henchpersons at their beck and call in order to retain certification, we regret to inform you that your girlboss has been reclassified as girlselfemployed.

All cells with mitochondria have a nucleus, all cells with a nucleus have mitochondria (or denegerated former mitochondria). It's not obvious that this should be so. In general, you should get branching after every trait (ofc this isn't always the case). If organisms with trait A are successful then there should be enough of them to branch. If they require trait B to be successful, trait A shouldn't have reached fixation in the first place, unless they were both caused by the same genetic modification.

Nick lanes theory, in the vital question, is that the mitochondria *directly* caused the development of the nucleus. If you're an archeon with bacteria living inside you, and one of them dies, it's membrane will dissolve and release its genetic material. You're an archeon, so you're used to doing lateral gene transfer, and will copy it's code into yours. This code has a poison and it's antidote

Bacterial genetic code has self-replicating parasitic genes. these genes are adapted to their bacterial host and splice themselves out before transcription. bacteria face strong selection to pare down their genome, so they dont have very many of these. but if you suddenly acquire a huge amount of bacterial genetic code, the parasites therein, not adapted to you, will put themselves in all sorts of bad places. then, because you dont face very strong selection, if these codes mutate in a way that breaks their ability to copy themselves, and splice themselves out before transcription, youll have a bunch of faulty genes. these dead regions are called introns. this is a huge problem! you can develop a protein to splice them out "manually", called the spliceosome, but it works slowly, too slowly to get them all fixed before they reach the ribosome to be made into proteins

HOWEVER, this bacterial code will also have a bunch of genetic code for bacterial membranes. the archeon will start producing a bunch of extra membrane enzymes, which will go around producing extra membranes. without adaptations to handle these, theyll just build up. around where theyre produced. lipids naturally form into closed surfaces in solution, so you'd end up with a bunch of lipid "bags" around your genome. but those bags are the solution to your intron problem! they impede the diffusion of the rna from the genome to the ribosome, giving the spliceosome time to work.

eventually (its theorized) these lipid bags evolved into an enclosed double membrane with pore membranes, but during mitosis they split into discrete lipid bags again!

love the word lackluster. well it sucks because it’s not shiny

You are sitting on a bench at the park. Someone approaches you. You turn to look at them, but you don’t recognize them. A stranger. They sit down next to you. Something isn’t quite right about them. Their hair is matted, their skin is rubbery, their eyes are vacant, their movements are unnatural. When you look at them, they just sit there. But when you look away, they- it- touches your arm. Its hand is CERTAINLY not human. Three fingers- long and slimy and bony- massage your arm and shoulders, feeling out the structure of your joints. You whip your head to face it again, and out of the corner of your eye you see a foreign appendage slink under the folds of its skin and clothes, which, you are now quite sure, form one costume together. You stand up and back away in horror. It doesn’t quite watch you go.

I like how there’s a category of careers (cowboy, pirate, spy, princess) that have a very specific historical and political context that they get stripped of for the entertainment of children

This still blows my mind