TITLE: Computing Everywhere, Sea Mammal Edition AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: June 21, 2019 2:35 PM DESC: ----- BODY: In The Narluga Is a Strange Beluga-Narwhal Hybrid, Ed Yong tells the story of a narluga, the offspring of a beluga father and a narwhal mother:
Most of its DNA was a half-and-half mix between the two species, but its mitochondrial DNA -- a secondary set that animals inherit only from their mothers -- was entirely narwhal.
This strange hybrid had a mouth and teeth unlike either of its parents, the product of an unexpected DNA computation:
It's as if someone took the program for creating a narwhal tusk and ran it in a beluga's mouth.
The analogy to software doesn't end there, though...
There's something faintly magical about that. This fluky merger between two species ended up with a mouth that doesn't normally exist in nature but still found a way of using it. It lived neither like a beluga nor a narwhal, but it lived nonetheless.
Fluky and abnormal; a one-off, yet it adapts and survives. That sounds like a lot of the software I've used over the years and, if I'm honest, like some of the software I've written, too. That said, nature is amazing. -----