Humans are Merely Hosts

[Cynic]

“We have 3 billion letters in DNA, but only one, one and a half percent of it is gene. The rest of it, 99% of it, is stuff. More than half of your total DNA, is not really yours, it consists of selfish DNA elements that somehow got into our genomes about a billion and a half years ago, and have been hopping around making copies of themselves. To those selfish DNA elements, we’re merely a host for them… The majority of our genome is this stuff, not us.” -Eric Lander PHD, MIT Department of Biology

Are these elements hitchhiking parasites, or is it possible that they bear some other significance, perhaps evolutionary significance? What do you think?


Our DNA consists of a sequence approximately 3 billion letters long, which represent adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. A gene is a packet of information, consisting of a sequence of these letters. A single base change (a bad letter) in our genes is the cause of diseases such as Cystic Fibrosis and Tay-Sachs, where certain proteins in our body cannot function properly because they are misshapen (which is due to the single base change). These genes, contain the information that makes up who we are. Surprisingly, there are only 30,000 genes in our genome (about 1.5%).