[hotnfresh]

Some of the research about being able to make simple animals grow structures from other animals in their evolutionary “tree” by changing chemical signaling—among other wild things like finding that memories may be stored outside the brain, at least in some animals—makes me think you need more than just the “code” to get the animal that would have been produced if that “code” were in its full context (of a reproductive cell doing all sorts of other stuff). Even if the dna contains the instructions for that reproductive cell, too, in some sense… which instructions do you “run”? There might be multiple possible variants, some of which don’t actually reproduce the animal you took the dna from.

[astrange]

My favorite trivia here is that flamingos aren't actually "genetically" pink but "environmentally" pink because they pick up the color from eating algae.

Except of course "genetics" and "environment" aren't actually separate things; sure, people's skin color isn't usually affected by their food, but only because most people don't eat colloidal silver.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Karason

[hotnfresh]

AFAIK most poisonous frogs also aren’t “naturally” poisonous—they get it from diet. Ones raised in captivity aren’t poisonous unless you go out of your way to feed them the things they need to become poisonous.