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Comment Re:Well duh? (Score 1) 313

I'd say there's an extreme bias in our current understanding of viruses because we only know about the ones that are blooming (lytic phase) during acute disease symptoms. We know very little about viruses that don't cause disease, or the viruses hiding around in latent form (say, non-blooming herpes) because there's no easy way to find them (even when we know their genomic sequence and have antibodies to tag their coats).

Comment Re:Well duh? (Score 0) 313

Yes - change "homosexual sex" to "non-procreative sex" and it's less controversial. What about just the human behavior of kissing? Perhaps it's a way of smelling each other's breath to check for disease signals, or sharing of pheromones, but I'm more inclined to think it's about virus transfer. I'd also presume that breast feeding might provide lateral transfer of beneficial genes via viruses that haven't "gone germline" yet. Viruses can also pass through the placenta to a fetus, and viruses can pass the blood-brain-barrier. It's possible that a beneficial virus could get passed around that actually changes human thought/behavior. A rabies infection makes a person hydrophobic, but rabies isn't exactly beneficial (except maybe to bats). Even more wacky - what if human rational consciousness is a function of one or many viruses that get transferred to embryos/fetuses/developing children? Perhaps over time some of those viruses have "gone germline" and are now HERVs. In that case God would not only be a viral meme, but also a molecular virus (or series of 'em) himself.

Comment R Bioconductor Cytoscape EGAN (Score 3, Informative) 113

Don't forget R/Bioconductor! Not only is R free/free, but there are thousands of available Bioconductor packages ready for out-of-the-box use. Also consider Cytoscape and or EGAN for graph visualization of established and experimental bio-knowledge. http://www.bioconductor.org/ http://www.cytoscape.org/ http://akt.ucsf.edu/EGAN/ (full disclosure - I work on EGAN)

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