Uit twee afzonderlijke onderzoeken blijkt dat het bewustzijn van mensen en daarmee het lange termijn geheugen, een gevolg is van een virus dat viervoeters honderden miljoenen jaren geleden opliepen.
De informatie van die viruscellen werd opgenomen in onze genetische code, waar het zich in de loop van de tijd evolueerde.
Zo weten we meteen waar god is ontstaan: in de hersenen van de mens!
Scientists
Say an Ancient Virus May Be Responsible for Human Consciousness
February
6, 2018 at 3:29 pm
Written
by Anti-Media
Team
(ANTIMEDIA) — According
to recent research, human beings’ capacity for higher reasoning may
be the direct result of an ancient virus that infected our
ancestors hundreds of millions of years ago.
Two studies by
two separate teams, both published last
month in the journal Cell,
suggest that a protein believed to be crucial to forming long-term
memories is the evolutionary remnant of an infection that spread
during the early days of four-legged species.
Researchers contend that
information stored within these viral cells became incorporated into
our genetic code, where it evolved into the activity-regulated
cytoskeleton-associated (Arc) protein over the subsequent 400 million
years.
The
new research shows that when a synapse in the brain fires, the Arc
protein copies instructions
onto RNA coding molecules and packages the genetic material within
virus-like capsules that travel between neurons.
Elissa
Pastuzyn, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Utah and the
lead author of one of the studies, told science
and technology publication Alphr that
her team was shocked to discover just how important the Arc protein
is:
“We
went into this line of research knowing that Arc was special in many
ways, but when we discovered that Arc was able to mediate
cell-to-cell transport of RNA, we were floored. No other non-viral
protein that we know of acts in this way.”
It
may sound a bit odd that a virus could be responsible for such vital
pieces of our genetic code, but in actuality, it’s not all that
uncommon. A study published
in 2016 revealed that between 40 and 80 percent of the human genome
is the result of an archaic viral invasion.
“While
we think that virus infections and outbreaks are a bad thing (and of
course they are), these bouts of infection also provide new source
material for evolution to create new genes that ultimately become
beneficial for the organism,” Dr.
Jason Shepard, a member of Pastuzyn’s team, told Alphr.
Researchers say the
next step is to bring in experts in neuroscience and ancient viruses
to work
out the
precise mechanisms for how the Arc protein arrived in the human
genome in its current state.