Evo-Devo (Despacito Biology Parody) | A Capella Science

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Recommends mettamage · 2020-04 · on “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”

It is, but it is increasing the branching factor by much more than finding all the "good" melodies in 400 years. Here's a good example of music that stands on it own right despite using the melody of despacito: [this video] - I'm pretty sure that most people at HN will appreciate this one whether they like despacito or not :)

Recommends vikramkr · 2020-04 · on “Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?”

I'll take a shot at trying to explain that to the best of my ability. I'm starting from the point where we have organisms and dna, since nobody knows how exactly abiogenesis happened yet. First, two general points. The most important thing to keep in mind is time. Life has had insane amounts of time. Billions of years. Beyond human comprehension amounts of time. The second most important thing is that complicated != carefully orchestrated or optimal. Life is pretty cool, but it doesn't hold itself to a very high standard. It's the survival of the good enough, and is full of so many random hacks and poor design choices it's insane. Things get easier to accomplish when you lower the standard.

Recommends TeMPOraL · 2020-11 · on “I should have loved biology”

> Producing a whole new limb or whatever is way more complicated that we'd like it to be. It isn't that much more complicated, though. Because as it turns out, you don't always have to code for that limb from scratch. You just have to flip a switch. The key phrase here is "evolutionary developmental biology". We've learned that complex life has a lot of Lego-life quality - a lot of DNA codes for signals that enable or disable creation of whole organs at various locations, stages and cadences. A TL;DR in four minutes by A Capella Science: [this video] . A nice example that video gives is that snakes have DNA coding for legs, it's just turned off. It can be turned on, and a snake will grow legs.

Recommends richardkiss · 2021-01 · on “Time-lapse of a single cell transforming into a salamander (2019)”

This entertaining video does a good job of, if not explaining, hinting at the mechanisms that make this possible: [this video]

Recommends Terr_ · 2024-06 · on “Can you inherit memories from your ancestors?”

Homeobox genes [0] are relevant when it comes to pretty high level "heads go on that end, butts go on that end" stuff. There's also this parody video of Despacito [1] that may be, er, educationally amusing. [0] [LINK] [1] [this video]

Recommends jkingsman · 2024-08 · on “The Genomic Code: The genome instantiates a generative model of the organism”

While this paper is perhaps is a bit of an overfitting of the concept of generative weights, another fun take is Evo-Devo[0], an acapella overview of evolutionary developmental biology. [0]: [this video]

Recommends TeMPOraL · 2025-01 · on “Ear muscle we thought humans didn't use activates when people listen hard”

Yup, DNA turned out to not merely be a sequence of triplets telling a dumb matter printer which hard-coded proteins to make - at least according to what little I understand of evolutionary developmental biology[0], DNA is much more like procedural generation in gamedev or demoscene. That is, there's plenty of recipes for various structures and body parts, and then there's lots of DNA that's responsible for conditionally enabling or disabling or modulating those recipes, depending on more DNA that controls when and where and how much to enable them, and then more - a complex network of logic . -- [0] - Didn't get much further than this four-minute intro to the field, but it is a good intro :

Cites gus_massa · 2017-10 · on “Jeremy the Lefty Snail Is Dead, but His Offspring Are All Right”

>>> conservation of angular momentum thing For the snails, probably you mean something like "initial break of symmetry". In the initial steps of the embryo, it must define the front-back, top-down, right-left axis. (I'm not sure about the technical names.) IIRC, each one is defined by some gradient of chemical signal, they are not mechanical, but I'm not sure. [LINK] Anyway, it would be a nice experiment to twist a snail embryo and see the development. In particular, the snail of the article has the reproductive and internal organs in the opposite side of most snails. What happens when you twist a snail embryo, do the internal organs get the mirrored position too??? Somewhat related: This ex