THE WORM TURNS AND TURNS AND TURNS

Back in the 1950s, before the four-letter words of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales reached TV, wives berated their husbands by calling them the names of lower creatures:

"You are a worm!" shouted the wife of a Mr. Milquetoast.

"You're just a fruit fly," snipped the under-satisfied Miss Hotpanz.

"You wolf!" yelled the wife of the village philanderer.

"Lounge lizard!" accused the wife of Mr. Lazy.

"Dumb bunny," was the favorite of Richie Rockhead's mother.

"Dirty, rotten, smelly skunk!" was the favorite of 10-year-old Mary Margaret Reilly.

Naturally. all men and boys resented these characterizations. How could a complex human being be compared to a simple, slimy earthworm? Anybody with two eyes could see that there was a huge difference between a repulsive lizard and a man. And what sane man would sit on a hill, howling at the moon? And not even the world's most flatulent man could simulate a skunk.

As a result, men concluded that such name-calling was simply further proof that the female sex suffered a severe logic gap.

Suddenly, decades later, DNA burst on the scene. Genes, the human genome and DNA became all the rage with public awareness (strongly energized by Law & Order and other TV shows).

In 2003, an elderly, newly educated and still cantankerous Mrs. Milquetoast yelled, "You are a worm, and I can prove it! This science study says that men have 21,000 genes and the C. Elegans earthworm has 20,000. This makes you 95% worm!"

According to the leading geneticists, even the fruit fly has about 20,000 genes. As do the lizard, the bunny, the wolf and the skunk.

All this gave women great satisfaction. They now had scientific validation that all men were closely related to the lower species. Even to the lowest of the low.

But now something new has reared its ugly head. It is called "RNA": a chemical that exists in all living creatures, even in trees and moss.

Until recently, science thought it understood how a cell worked. The DNA (bosses) used RNA (clerks) to send messages and instructions to the protein-building cells (workers), which would create whatever they were told to do -- on everything on earth, from humans to earthworms.

Now science has discovered that it has completely misunderstood the status and power of RNA. Far from merely being a messenger and gatherer, RNA is the boss of bosses. It decides what the DNA is going to instruct protein-building cells to do. Things like, "Give this one a head" ... "Give this one a tail" ... "Give this one a brain" ... "Make this one slimy" ... "Cover this one with fur."

In the new order of things, RNA is the architect, DNA is the contractor, protein-RNA is the white-collar worker, and protein cells are the construction workers.

Science now recognizes that a man cannot be a worm, even though both have a similar number of genes.

A man cannot be a worm because the creatures have vastly different numbers and kinds of RNA.

Now about the logic RNA gap.......

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