life inspired

"One of the great challenges in molecular and evolutionary biology is to explain the link between giant evolutionary leaps, such as the colonization of land by plants or the emergence of vertebrates, and the underlying genetic and genomic changes. For a long time, biologists thought that such profound changes in phenotype would be accompanied—if not driven by—equally dramatic upheavals at the genetic level. Similarly, the emergence of the flowering plants within the plant kingdom, or mammalian vertebrates, must surely have been marked by recognizable changes in the genome. Yet in fact, it turns out that the genomic changes that enabled these evolutionary developments were far more subtle—it is the regulation, rather than the modification or creation, of genes that has driven macroscopic events throughout evolution. Full article @ "EMBO Reports