Hox gene

No, Stevie, new body plans are not an unsolved problem, and your song and dance about all this crazy information and circuitry outside of the genome is bullshit.

The body plan is determined by Hox and Tale genes which regulate the expression of other genes to determine how embryonic development and cell differentiation occur.

This is all these guys can do: confidently use esoteric terminology to pretend that scientists are hopelessly confused about how life works, which wouldn’t prove their god even if it were true.

There was one, one origin of life researcher, and I said, "Look, y- you're, you are a synthetic organic chemist.

Three, the rise of predation.

And four, the Hox gene.

Let's start at the obvious numero uno, oxygen.

Remember the great oxygenation event from Episode 7? Oxygen levels had been gradually rising for hundreds of millions of years.

But just because you desperately need something doesn't mean you magically have the biological ability to make it.

So what else was going on? Part of the answer was machinery.

Number four, the Hox gene.

Because here's the thing about oxygen and calcium and predation pressure, none of it gets you a radically different animal body unless the genome already has a way to build one.

Yeah.

So hox genes are a real thing, H-O-X.

I don't know what he would have said, what that first word was, but hox genes are like...

They're like regulatory genes that help regulate cell division and kind of the segmentation of the embryo and which parts develop into which parts, essentially.