maize is so fucking weird. like i can’t even cover it in one post so i’m just gonna focus on one of the LARGEST reasons it’s so fucked up in this post so buckle in babes it’s time for a wild ride
to understand maize genetics on a fundamental level, we have to understand the work of Dr. Barbara McClintock, a brilliant botanist who dedicated her life to how fucked up corn is while simultaneously never being taken seriously because she was a woman. McClintock noticed a few things while studying maize in the early 1940s. as you might know, maize doesn’t always look all yellow; sometimes the kernels are colored differently, like this:
well yeah about that, she started noticing correlations in how the kernels were colored based on certain cases of the genes (imagine them as sections of DNA) she was looking at being rendered nonfunctional (or being “broken”).
for instance, lets say we breed a maize plant thats supposed to have only purple cobs, but when it grows up, the cobs are a different color entirely, or patterned differently, or completely different from what we were expecting. this happened a lot to McClintock. like, constantly. after testing the DNA of the plant, she would find that the reason the plant didn’t bear purple cobs was because of other genes randomly teleporting into the middle of the gene she was testing for. so our purple maize plant wouldn’t make purple cobs because some random ass shit inserted itself in the actual fucking middle of the ‘make purple pigment’ gene, causing it to ‘break’. we now know these teleporting little shits as “transposons”, and they’re a normal thing that casually happens IN ALL LIVING THINGS. but they didn’t know that in the 1940s.
so not only did McClintock have random shit jumping into other random shit, but she had a REALLY hard time on her primary project of mapping the maize genome (the act of building a basic outline of which gene goes where on each chromosome) because it seemed like no matter what gene she was looking at, it would be in a different place in the genomes of all her plants (it should be noted that as we know them to be, many genes really are stable and stay in their same positions consistently through a species. for instance, lets say that there’s a gene on your 5th chromosome that codes for eye color. although your eye color may be different than the person next to you, their eye color gene is still located on the 5th chromosome; the code is just different. in McClintock’s case, NOTHING was staying consistently ANYWHERE between multiple samples of corn).
this was a BIG mistake. she continued to publish her results for the next 15 years until she got so much hate she had to stop publishing the evidence she found not only for the existence of transposons, but her theories as to why they were there and what purpose they serve. other scientists in her (primarily male) field of experimental genetics REFUSED to believe this from her until nearly two decades later, when two male scientists- fellow biology students may recognize the names Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod, who worked with confirming the regulation of the lac operon and are still considered the fathers of epigenetics despite you know, not actually being the fathers of epigenetics since she did it twenty years earlier and i personally refuse to worship their shitty ass milk triumph- confirmed that genes could be, you know, regulated, and that the genome could be changed over the course of your life and that transposons were VERY MUCH possible and were also rediscovered in the following decade in similar encounters. anyway she casually won the nobel prize for her work in 1983, literally 40 years after she discovered it when everyone realized that she had been right all along and that they’d been belittling her and shitting on her for decades over it lol.
anyway, all that aside: why is corn weird? why did it take until literally 2009 for us to map the maize genome for the first time?
70-85% of the genome of maize, in it’s natural form, literally does not stay in one place between generations. it just doesn’t. it fumbles around and breaks shit CONSTANTLY when exposed to different things. its an actual trainwreck in a constant state of slamming shit into other shit until shit happens. like given, plants in general have weird genomes and like, i can understand that and accept that, but this is actually fucking ridiculous. to put this in perspective, roughly44% of the human genome is transposons or transposon-like elements. take that amount and double it and you have about the same amount of genomic chaos as maize. i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again:
the maize genome is a goddamn build-a-bear workshop and it scares me
The outermost ring shown here is Saturn’s E ring, the core of which is situated about 149,000 miles (240,000 kilometers) from Saturn. The geysers erupting from the south polar terrain of the moon Enceladus supply the fine icy particles that comprise the E ring; diffraction by sunlight gives the ring its blue color.
The Okeanos Explorer has discovered a very cute octopus at a depth of 4,290 metres.
This is the deepest an octopus of this particular sub order of octopus has ever been seen.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noted this is a completely unsubscribed species and perhaps not belonging to any specific genus. Highlighting how little we still know about the creatures in the depths of our oceans.
The eyes-in-the-front thing (usually) only applies to mammals. Crocodiles, arguably the inspiration for dragons, have eyes that look to the sides despite being a predator.
hey what up I’m about to be That Asshole
This isn’t a mammalian thing. When people talk about ‘eyes on the front’ or ‘eyes on the side,’ they’re really talking about binocular vision vs monocular vision. Binocular vision is more advantageous for predators because it’s what gives you depth perception; i.e, the distance you need to leap, lunge, or swipe to take out the fast-moving thing in front of you. Any animal that can position its eyes in a way that it has overlapping fields of vision has binocular vision. That includes a lot of predatory reptiles, including komodo dragons, monitor lizards, and chameleons.
(The eyes-in-front = predator / eyes-on-sides = prey thing holds true far more regularly for birds than it does for mammals. Consider owls, hawks, and falcons vs parrots, sparrows, and doves.)
But it’s not like binocular vision is inherently “better” than monocular vision. It’s a trade-off: you get better at leap-strike-kill, but your field of vision is commensurately restricted, meaning you see less stuff. Sometimes, the evolutionary benefit of binocular vision just doesn’t outweigh the benefit of seeing the other guy coming. Very few forms of aquatic life have binocular vision unless they have eye stalks, predator or not, because if you live underwater, the threat could be coming from literally any direction, so you want as wide a field of view as you can get. If you see a predator working monocular vision, it’s a pretty safe assumption that there is something else out there dangerous enough that their survival is aided more by knowing where it is than reliably getting food inside their mouths.
For example, if you are a crocodile, there is a decent chance that a hippo will cruise up your shit and bite you in half. I’d say that makes monocular vision worthwhile.
Which brings us back to OP’s point. Why would dragon evolution favor field of view over depth perception?
A lot of the stories I’ve read painted the biggest threats to dragons (until knights with little shiny sticks came along) as other dragons. Dragons fight each other, dragons have wars. And like fish, a dragon would need to worry about another dragon coming in from any angle. That’s a major point in favor of monocular vision. Moreover, you don’t need depth perception in order to hunt if you can breathe fucking fire. A flamethrower is not a precision weapon. If you can torch everything in front of you, who cares if your prey is 5 feet away or 20? Burn it all and sift among the rubble for meat once everything stops moving.
Really, why would dragons have eyes on the front of their heads? Seems like they’ve got the right idea to me.
hmm? what’s that? oh, you don’t like my seeds? *evolves into a fruit that bears no seeds but is now a monoculture that is especially susceptible to pests and disease* how about that idiot
Y’all ever just suddenly have the overwhelming urge to swim??? Like not actively but you just wanna,,, be in the water and have some Peace
Yes it’s called the mammalian diving response and it’s also why doing face masks and taking a shower is soothing. Our amphibian ancestors used this mechanism to slow down the heartbeat and lower body temperature so as not to waste calories while swimming (which is very calorie intensive). It makes you feel safe because predators are less likely to get you in water than on land. The fish brain is alive and well in all of us.
It’s literally activated by putting water on the face.
my sister just told me that technically kangaroos have five limbs because their tail is classified as a leg bc they use that to propel themselves forward which makes them the only pentapedal animal on earth
she just told me that there’s a frog that literally grow a spiky moustache and goes and fights other male frogs for a gf
turns out flamingos aren’t actually pink. they’re born grey but turn pink from the shrimp they eat
so my dudes,,, it turns out theres a flower that only blooms every couple years, and ik what ur thinking “wow it must be beautiful”. turns out it smells like fucking corpses!!! what!! the fuck!!!
my best friend just told me that frogs use their eyeballs to swallow their food by retracting them into their head and pushing the food down and honestly?? the most horrific thing ive ever heard
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