2w ago

where's my damn plume

64 comments

If people had wings and could fly it would be considered exercise and nobody would do it.
- Americans wouldn't do it, the rest of the world would
  
  I was about to be offended and then I remembered how I got out of breath walking up the stairs this morning. (To be fair, I'm anemic af and almost certainly have a touch of long covid, but still.)
  
  Why would I fly for twenty minutes when I can drive for an hour 🙄
  
  Yes. Burgerlanders are very averse to any level of self improvement that might be difficult. I blame the car culture propaganda more than I blame the people though.
  
  Yeah one time I traveled to Europe and everyone was just running everywhere. Very efficient.
  
  Please stop bad-mouthing Americans, it's just self loathing at this point. It cannot be that black and white.
- If you look at birds like the kakapo, they would've had flight in the evolutionary past, but evolved out of it due to lack of predatory threat.
  This can be part of Island syndrome, where the dodo also suffered from, till sailors came around and found out they were tasty.
- We'd end up making flying cars so we wouldn't have to fly ourselves...
- this is literally how it works for birds, that's why you see especially pidgeons and corvids walking so often, they just don't need to fly a lot so they simply walk.
  
  That can be dangerous in the long term.
  Mitchell and Webb - Flightless birds

Behold, a feathered biped
- Plato is gonna be fuckin pissed

Between this, my stripes, and my tail.. all things I have genes for, but no activation...
I'm kinda pissed, being human could be far less cringe
- Humans do have stripes but we ourselves can’t see them.
  Look up Blaschko lines
  
  isn't that only true for XX chromosome people?
  
  Unless you have the right skin condition I don't think they're visible in any wavelength

I’m good on the feathers I read the goosebumps book about learning to fly and it gave me a preview of my trypophobia when R.L. Stine described the feathers growing out of the main characters skin
ETA: it was “chicken chicken” not “how I learned to fly”
- Huh? I just read this book and that was not in there. The kids just drank a potion and then could fly, there was no outward difference to them. Maybe you are mixing up a different one, like the chicken one? We just started that so idk how it goes. The cover has the girl as a chicken though.
  
  Ahh I checked the synopsis and you’re right I definitely got it mixed up with another. I need to find it now.
  ETA:Definitely the chicken one jeez it just gave me goosebumps

MF walking one way into getting a pile of teratomas

My guess is they mean we have the genes to encode the proteins, since we have similar keratinized tissues like hair and nails. But probably not the hox genes to encode the structure
- Well then put the box genes in me so I can have a damn plume

Stunning creatures, sea lions.
Wonderful plumage.

Fierce Creatures (1997)
- There's certainly something stunning and wonderful in that picture all right
  
  I also have a thing for short guys in glasses!
  
  Her shoes

This sounds like a fun PhD project
- No funding. Less fun

I want the damn feathers for the social aspect! If we were allowed to preen each other, the world would be a better place!
- we are allowed to preen each other, just start helping your friends and family with their haircuts

TIL evolution is bad at deleting legacy code
- We just comment it out in case we ever need it again.

While we're on the topic, we all have very slightly webbed digits, multiple involuntary reflexes for when we get wet, and a nasal/respiratory system that is (partially) adapted to swimming. I wonder how far our DNA could be pushed to pad out what was started here?
- Our throat region seems poorly thought out. As somebody said recently, tube food goes in or you die is right next to tube food must never block or you die.
  
  The fact that billions of us still get that right hundreds of times a day is honestly pretty fucking insane, with how delicate that whole setup is

Quick someone get CRSIPR therapy

What does that even mean, you have like “four letters” and dna strands of millions long. Like how selective do you have to be. I’m sure you can basically write anything that way.
Are there entire chunks that are inactive that would give feathers, that at some point gave feathers to our ancestors?
- All things DNA is full of code that doesn't get activated and is just passed on anyways
  Gene expression is what they mean by "activated"
  Basically think of it like having a library of instruction books and only grabbing a few of them to do the project that needs done.
- DNA contains coding and control regions. Changes to the coding regions are rare, most of the evolutionary stuff is happening within those control regions instead. Mutations there are more likely to result in interesting effects by affecting the way genes activate and interact, while the coding regions do the heavy lifting.
  Losing some feature could be as simple as a mutation that permanently switches off the control region of a gene, even if the gene itself and the interactions formerly coded around it still work. Over time, those accumulate mutations and degrade, since they are not useful and therefore evolution doesn't preserve them, but they are still there. For example, we have an inactivated gene that used to make an enzyme that would break down uric acid. So we get gout, but our ancestors didn't.
- I agree, this seems pretty misleading. And are there any other feathered animals other than on the dinosaur branch? Because if not, how should the feather DNA even end up in mammalian DNA?? Or maybe feathers are produced by very common differently used genes? But in this case this would be even more nonsensical...
- I recall that scientists reactivated chicken genes for teeth and grew a toothed chook