Conflict Resolution

Abstract

The tasks of evolutionary bioinformatics are to identify the forms of information that genomes convey, and show how potential conflicts between different forms are reconciled. Apparent redundancies (e.g. diploidy; Chapter 2), and beliefs in the existence of “neutral” mutations (Chapter 7), and of “junk” DNA (Chapter 12), tended to support the view that there is much vacant genome space, and hence “room for all” in the journey of the genes through the generations. Suggestions that there might be conflicts between different forms of information were not taken too seriously. However, when genomic information was thought of in the same way as the other forms of information with which we arc familiar (sec Chapters 2–4), it became evident that apparent redundancies might actually play important roles — errordetection and correction, and much more. The possibility of conflict could no longer be evaded. The essential argument of this book is that many puzzling features of genomes can best be understood in such terms, as will be emphasized in this and subsequent chapters.

“There would appear to be no reason why the recombinator should not be a sequence which codes in the normal way for amino acids, and that it would therefore be within the genes rather than between them”. Robin Holliday (1968) [1]