Word: geneses
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It is only when you ask the question the third time that you begin to see a glimpse of an affirmative answer. Start with three premises. First, dinosaurs did not die out; indeed there are roughly twice as many species of their descendants still here on Earth as there are...
Third, and most exciting, geneticists are finding many "pseudogenes" in human and animal DNA--copies of old, discarded genes. It's a bit like finding the manual for a typewriter bound into the back of the manual for your latest word-processing software. There may be a lot of interesting...
Put these three premises together, and the implication is clear: the dino genes are still out there. So throw your mind forward a few decades, and try out the following screenplay. A bunch of bioinformatics nerds in Silicon Valley, looking for an eye-catching project to showcase the latest IPO...
Then they start fiddling with it--turning on old pseudogenes; knocking out the genes for feathers and putting back in the genes for scaly skin; tweaking the genes for the skull so that teeth appear instead of a beak; shrinking the wings, keel and wishbone (ostrich genes would be helpful...
They might not have to fix that many genes--just a few hundred mainly developmental ones. The genes for the immune system, for memory mechanisms and the like would all be standard for a vertebrate. To fine-tune the creature, they could go fishing in other bird genomes, or perhaps...