If I had written this and showed it to my PhD advisor, I would have gotten an earful about how "what do you mean by... be specific... what about...", etc. My PI was a nitpicker. Poor fools whose papers had to be edited by him...
That said, RNA splicing is perhaps the single most important RNA editing process in the entire eukaryotic world. And it is so widespread and universally conserved that you can put a human gene in a mouse and it would be spliced the same way. So I don't think RNA editing is something so rare.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Phylogenetic-tree-depict...
That gives plenty of time for some mechanism to evolve in one of the two branches and not in the other. RNA editing may not be rare in that part of the evolutionary tree but I do wonder if it was already present in that common ancestor.
https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/revealing-genome-comm...
[1] https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/steve-brusatte/the-rise...
https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.100...
If I remember correctly, cephalopods have an absolutely enormous amount of RNA editing going on, but it's so much so that their coding DNA is essentially fixed, because if any of it changes all the RNA editing falls over and they're non-viable.
It is just an older field with more established "traditions" and big names that reinforce themselves over time. Regardless, I don't think it is relevant. By number, life science research is only behind the military in funding. And by utility, show me one person who does not depend on any kind of healthcare or medicine and I will show you ten people who never used machine learning products (easier to find than you think when we get out of the western hemisphere). It is banal to claim ML has more utility. It sure can make more money, but the impact on a personal level isn't comparable. Society can still function without AI but take away healthcare and you will see it goes to shit real fast.
It's like taking a program at v0.1 and then developing the entire thing via binary patches, at one point you've got so much binary patching going on any edition and recompilation of the source makes them not work.
* dies *
Medicine and biohacking are simply tools to improve evolutionary fitness.
On a more serious note, it's very interesting to see the different mechanisms that nature develops for adaptability.
It seems like there's a trade off here between heredability and adaptability, with cephalopods favouring the second one. Meaning on a long scale their evolution might be slower but it allows them to overcome challenges on the short term more effectively. If I understood correctly, as I haven't read the whole thing yet.
On the other hand, we may be about to bring about our own extinction and I'm willing to bet squid will be around no matter how much surface warming and sea level rise there is.
Squid could well be the pinboard to our delicious ...
Yes, they have those.
Functional organization of visual responses in the octopus optic lobe https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098222...
Do I have to pay them a beer now or something now that I found the marker word hidden in their paper they thought no one would read?
https://mindmatters.ai/2022/01/science-paper-could-octopuses...
