Infection

language
Language comes from an ancient virus in the brain Here, have a couple quotes from the citation: That’s not a coincidence. The team showed that Arc descends from an ancient group of genes called gypsy retrotransposons, which exist in the genomes of various animals, but can behave like their own independent entities.* They can make new copies of themselves, and paste those duplicates elsewhere in their host genomes. At some point, some of these genes gained the ability to enclose themselves in a shell of proteins and leave their host cells entirely. That was the origin of retroviruses—the virus family that includes HIV.

* This article has been corrected to reflect the fact that Arc genes were co-opted by animals from a group of genes that also gave rise to retroviruses, and are not directly descended from retroviruses, as originally stated. We regret the error.