You thought humans were special?
Two recent publications on other animals DNA (RNA) and capabilities sure puts humans to shame … humans are really not that special, regardless of what you think about yourself.
Horses
Horses are engineered (DNA) to perform at endurance rates humans can only fantasize about with robotics. Per the post in Popular Science, birds also have capabilities that humans can only fantasize about. PopSci post is based on work published in Science.
Horses, however, are in a league of their own.
Despite the persistent myth that our species evolved to chase down prey on the savanna, horses will generally beat even the most elite human endurance athletes in contests of speed and distance. New research helps explain why and how horses have an athletic advantage.
The report states, “a unique and ancient spate of genetic mutations was key to the evolution of horses’ exceptional aerobic fitness. Together, these changes enable horse muscles to use oxygen quickly and efficiently, without incurring the cellular damage normally associated with burning through lots of fuel.”
If you thought that horses mutation, evolution capabilities were unique, you’d be wrong
“It implied convergent evolution,” Castiglione says. But once the scientists dug deeper, they found that the genetic shift in horses is far more complicated than the bird mutation. Horses, it turns out, had to clear many more evolutionary hurdles to make it to their final, fit form. One of these hurdles is so rare, it’s a type of mutation only previously seen in a subset of viruses.
The post continues to describe the specific proteins involved in this horse athletic magic and how it might be a springboard for gene engineering in humans (do we really want that?).
Lungfish
On a similar vein, recent scientific studies discovered that the lungfish genome is WAY more complicated and extensive than the human genome.
In the mysterious depths of Earth’s evolutionary history, a peculiar aquatic creature has emerged as the record holder for the largest genome among all animals: the South American lungfish (Lepidosiren paradoxa). This fascinating fish boasts a genetic code that is 30 times larger than the human genome, revealing new insights into the evolutionary leap from water to land.
30x as large and ancient … helped them emerge from water, and yet they can sort-of live in both. Can humans do that? Absolutely amazing. In case you are wondering, yes – this is a part of our evolutionary tree.
This ancient creature shares a common ancestor with all tetrapods—four-limbed vertebrates, including humans.
A next logical question – why does the lungfish require such a complex genome? Fast evolution and jumping genes …
The lungfish genome owes its enormous size to an abundance of transposons. While these jumping genes can disrupt normal genetic function, they also drive rapid genetic changes that may play a role in evolution.
Wikipedia states:
Lungfish are freshwater vertebrates belonging to the class Dipnoi.[1] Lungfish are best known for retaining ancestral characteristics within the Osteichthyes, including the ability to breathe air, and ancestral structures within Sarcopterygii, including the presence of lobed fins with a well-developed internal skeleton. Lungfish represent the closest living relatives of the tetrapods (which includes living amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals). The mouths of lungfish typically bear tooth plates, which are used to crush hard shelled organisms.
Today there are only six known species of lungfish, living in Africa, South America, and Australia, though they were formerly globally distributed. The fossil record of the group extends into the Early Devonian, over 410 million years ago. The earliest known members of the group were marine, while almost all post-Carboniferous representatives inhabit freshwater environments.
Update later in day …
Science just posted a great piece on bonobos and a breakthrough research study on their language … maybe they too are special
Compositionality, the capacity to combine meaningful elements into larger meaningful structures, is a hallmark of human language. Compositionality can be trivial (the combination’s meaning is the sum of the meaning of its parts) or nontrivial (one element modifies the meaning of the other element). Recent studies have suggested that animals lack nontrivial compositionality, representing a key discontinuity with language. In this work, using methods borrowed from distributional semantics, we investigated compositionality in wild bonobos and found that not only does each call type of their repertoire occur in at least one compositional combination, but three of these compositional combinations also exhibit nontrivial compositionality. These findings suggest that compositionality is a prominent feature of the bonobo vocal system, revealing stronger parallels with human language than previously thought.