Related:<p><i>How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25655346">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25655346</a> - Jan 2021 (106 comments)
One way that viral elements are expressed are as transposons.<p>There is even an infectious variant, a gypsy transposon, that can move to neighboring cells.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposable_element" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposable_element</a>
It's a little odd to consider the idea that fighting off modern viruses today, might actually be impeding human evolution in some way we can't foresee.
> The syncytiotrophoblast is the outermost layer of the placenta, the part that is pressed against the uterus. It’s literally a layer of cells that have fused together, forming a wall. ... There’s no other structure like this anywhere else in the body.”<p>> When evolutionary biologists like Chuong mapped the genomes of these cells, they found that the protein that allowed these cells to fuse into a wall, called syncytin, didn’t look like it came from human DNA. It looked more like HIV.<p>So the entire premise of the placenta evolving from a virus rests on the fact that the organ has a unique function requiring a unique protein in the body. Saying the source probably is a virus seems quite a leap of thought. And aren't there many highly specialized proteins in the body?<p>Has anybody has some more information on what protein in a retrovirus looks similar to syncytin?
If every part of a human coming from evolution, how it synchronize between each part? Is there any books explaining evolution in detail? How cell formed? How they found a way to multiply? How they choose DNA to store the information? And so on.
Cells left behind can make the mother a chimera with out knowing. <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)</a>
This seems to be a common thing. We're an amalgamation of different viruses and bacteria that somehow over billions of years coalesced and evolved together into what we are now. I'm never not astounded when I think about it.
Think about it.<p>The species that is now Mitochondria was an entirely different species.<p>We carry Mitochondrial DNA, while the human side is Nuclear DNA…nucleus of every cell.<p>Birth as we know it wouldn’t have happened without a third species invading our cells. We know it as placenta.<p>Profound that we fight microbes, but without two (that we know about), our species literally (accurate use) would not exist.<p>At all.<p>Just, wow.