> I don't think they will tell you the whole truth.
This is true:
>We receive more details and activity than what appears in your off-Facebook activity. For technical and accuracy reasons, we don’t show all the activity we’ve received. This includes things like information we’ve received when you’re not logged into Facebook, or when we can’t confirm that you’ve previously used Facebook on that device. We also don’t show details like the item you’ve added to your shopping cart.
Thanks for that link. Looks like the infamous "ghost profiles" are officially confirmed now.
I wish they would show the ghost profiles as well, but since it's not linked with 100% confidence they are probably not allowing it because it could be a privacy violation if it turns out that the link was incorrect (i.e. they showed a ghost profile to the wrong user).
>Also some genes are known to actually "jump" between species.
Simple microscopic organisms, sure. Viruses, maybe. There's no evidence it's ever happened in something as large as a moth larva.
Even if these genes somehow (let's say a nice Sci-Fi virus) caused these genes to "jump" species... a gene that limits whether female larvae of these moths survive is unlikely to affect whether e.g. bats grow to adulthood or mate.
In fact, genes jumping from e.g. a moth larvae to another species (like humans) is rather rare... you haven't seen much on the evening news about humans suddenly developing moth wings, have you? Why do you think that is so?
"Far from just being the product of our parents, scientists have now shown that widespread transfer of genes between species has radically changed the genomes of today's mammals, and been an important driver of evolution."
Direct genetic transfer among higher organisms doesn't happen, and in fact the mechanism for how it happens indirectly isn't really known, but probably includes viruses and some carrier for them between species like mosquitos.
Also, the chunks of information being transferred aren't coding for specific functions, they're transposable, meaning they're non specific enough that even if you copied them from one organism to another in corresponding area of the DNA strands, the results would be completely different.
It'd be like copying the letters "lp" from the word "alphabet" to the word integer, as in "ilpnteger". The result is very different in function to the original. It probably doesn't make sense (not a viable organism) and while it does help drive genetic variation which is important for evolution, that's very different from a wholesale copying of meaning (phenotype, or the function of the genes in the original organism) to the new word.
Putting it more simply, if you copy the genes for a bat's wings wholesale to a human, you don't get a winged human. The most likely result is something that won't grow beyond a single cell, or if it does it wouldn't be recognizable as human or even an organism. The chances of getting something resembling wings are very low, and a human that could fly using them is literally impossible.
You can't copy the moth's "stale offspring" feature to another organism by copying genes, it just doesn't work.
