"An endangered monkey has given scientists new insights into evolution. The leaf-eating douc langur, native to East and Southeast Asia, has a "duplicated" gene that started as an extra copy of a gene for a particular enzyme but mutated into a gene for another enzyme with a different purpose...because the new gene is redundant, it is free to mutate until it finds a new job...duplicate gene evolved much faster than would be expected from random change, suggesting that positive selection was at work", reports Daily Inscight.

"nearly every social phobia and panic disorder is rooted in a single stretch of about 60 genes"

"the duplication isn't being passed along according to standard patterns of heredity... (passed down through the generations virtually unchanged)...Not only does its position change along the chromosome, but its sequence is sometimes inverted or otherwise rearranged. Stranger still, those changes sometimes occur from cell to cell in the same individual, not just between parents and offspring...the duplication itself isn't being passed along. Rather, it's the tendency to duplicate that's inherited." reports Discover.

Bast comments: The evidence is accumulating. Junk DNA isn't dormant. It is a breeding ground for evolutionary change. Junk DNA keeps mutating until it becomes advantageous, then it is positively selected and becomes useful DNA. The higher the mutation rate (more cosmic ray collisions), the faster we evolve.