You worship DNA; Nick Lane worships ATP. WIDE-EYED ENTERTAINMENT LTD.
On August 14, a writer for Geek.com, Meredith Placko, posted a story with this headline: “Scientists Declare That Octopuses Are Basically Aliens.” If you have a Facebook account, you certainly saw this headline in your news feed. And if you bothered to read the post, you would have learned that American and Japanese researchers have sequenced the sea creature’s genome and found its DNA structure to be so strange that it seemed to have evolved on another planet. Weirder yet, octopuses can even change their genetic code.
The problem I have with Placko’s post is that it framed alienness as a matter of DNA…
