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A comment on Your Brain Is Not An Onion With A Tiny Reptile Inside (2020). Parent comment

Re:Your Brain Is Not An Onion With A Tiny Reptile Inside (2020) by cma on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @12:59PM (#37572859)
Eyes are a good example of conservation and path dependence, development is initiated by a fairly highly conserved gene:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAX6#Species_distribution

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Re:Your Brain Is Not An Onion With A Tiny Reptile Inside (2020) by Retric on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @06:40PM (#37578020)
Being reasonably conserved has minimal predictive power. Yes, knocking it or a closely related gene out out harms eye formation in a wide range of species but it says little about what specific structure ends up being formed.
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