Larry writes
I am positive Larry knows these things. He just forgot about them temporarily, so this is a friendly reminder.
There may have been a time in the past when scientists imagined a static genome that only changed slowly over millions of years. However, beginning in the 1960's we began to see the genome as a much more dynamic entity. The first evidence of this kind of genome came with the discovery of huge amounts of variation between individuals in a species.I have to disagree with his interpretation of history here. In the next paragraph he writes
This was followed by the discovery of transposons and junk DNA.I'll grant the junk DNA part, but Barbara McClintock described mobile elements in the 1940s, even though it took the rest of the world 30 years to catch on.1 He then mentions "chromosomal rearrangements such as inversions, duplications, and translocations." Of course, these had been known since at least the 1910s. Chromosomal rearrangements played a vital role in establishing Thomas Hunt Morgan's chromosomal theory of heredity, and the basic data the Theodosius Dobzhansky used in many of his studies of Drosophila pseudoobscura were the frequencies of different inversion types.
I am positive Larry knows these things. He just forgot about them temporarily, so this is a friendly reminder.
1The rest of the world outside of maize geneticists. They understood her results and their significance.
Point taken.
I was writing from the perspective of things entering into the mainstream worldview so I shouldn't have used the word "discovered." I should have said, "This was followed by an appreciation of the role of transposons and the amount of junk DNA in mammalian genomes."
BTW, there was a considerable lag between McClintock's papers on mobile genetic elements and the description of what they actually were.
And, yes, I did know about the history of rearrangements so I probably could have written more detail.
The main point of the article was that there are far too many modern biologists who don't know any of this stuff. They think it's all recent discoveries that are going to overthrow our view of genomes.
That's the frustrating part.
Thanks for pointing out Larry Moran's "forgetfulness." He seems to "forget" quite a bit. McClintock (and some others) were writing about the dynamism of the genome long before the 1960s, and you are right, it pretty much took decades for others to catch on. Even when they did start catching on (in the later 60s, 70s, up until McClintock's Nobel Prize time), the prevailing view was that a lot of that dynamism was not integral to the essential functioning of the genome. McClintock, of course, thought differently.