Daily Archives: 27/04/2017

Yet another “unexpected” piece of news on evolution was carried by the Washington Post, though here’s a link to the version in The Independent. As you will see, it concerns the remarkable degree to which cephalopod mollusks like octopi recode their RNA for a number of important functions, including (as the relevant study shows) their nervous system. It appears that their proverbial intelligence is not in the genes, but in their editing (the article contrasts them with the Nautilus, a cephalopod that doesn’t recode, and doesn’t therefore predict election results, escape down pipes and so on).