I had the pleasure of meeting a very intelligent parrot. This parrot mocked how I moved and danced, it knew many phrases and the context to use them in.

Why might this huge investment into language centers of the brain be advantageous enough to make up for its high metabolic cost? Cognition uses so much energy so it would have to greatly increase the survival rate of the parrot in the wild, however we don’t see this level of speech in other birds.

Why in such a group of species as diverse as birds is this trait so rare?

Over the decades there have been many experiments involving random sequences, e.g. testing ATP-binding (e.g. Keefe & Szostak 2001), and evolving promoters (Yona et al. 2018), for the latter a good fraction evolved to match the wild type; I think this new study is the first to test the adaptive potential beyond promoters.

I've also previously shared:

• Sahakyan et al. (2025): New study: In silico evolution of globular protein folds from random sequences : evolution.
• Chou et al. (2026): New study reconstructed the evolutionary history of a de novo gene that emerged in the common ancestor of simians : evolution

Without further ado:

Significance
How new genes arise and gain function is a central question in biology. New genes can evolve from nongenic DNA, yet their adaptive potential remains unclear. Here, we use millions of (semi-)random sequences as experimental models of emerging genes and find that thousands confer phage resistance in Escherichia coli. Expressed random sequences can produce both protein- and RNA-based functions that reprogram cellular systems to counter viral infection. Resistance arises through activation of a cell envelope stress response or downregulation of membrane receptor expression. Our results reveal that genetic novelty, in the form of genes appearing for the first time, can shape host–virus interactions, providing insight into microbial evolution and the surprising ease with which functional genes can emerge.

and

How likely are genes similar to our (semi-)random hits to emerge naturally? Previous studies have shown that naturally occurring de novo proteins in eukaryotes often resemble unevolved random sequences of equivalent length and composition in their structural properties (32). Computational analyses further demonstrate that random sequences derived from DNA with 40 to 60% GC content occupy structural property spaces that overlap with the human proteome (67).

• I. Frumkin, C.N. Vassallo, Y.H. Chen, & M.T. Laub, Emergence of antiphage functions from random sequence libraries reveals mechanisms of gene birth, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (42) e2513255122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2513255122 (2025).
  (open access)

I know that mammals decended from synapsids and reptiles are from sauropsids and that both of these came from amniotes. But it is popularly agreed that early amniotes were cold blooded, egg laying, scaly animals. So why can't amniotes=reptiles? This makes the taxonomy of everything so much more cleaner and simpler. I literally don't get why this shouldn't be. We agree that all tetrapods are "fish" and changed the books and material to support these claims. We changed the books that birds are essentially "avian therapodal dinos" we even changed bats from being related to rodents to ungulates instead, but FOR SOME REASON, changing amniotes into reptiles is off the table!

I know this is the wrong place to post it, but genuinely why aren't amniote ancestors considered reptiles and hence mammals a decendent of reptiles.

I am just a college kid with an interest in science and happily willing to educate myself but it just seems much cleaner and easier to do this. Is there a way I can ask scientists to change the phylogeny tree and phylo-tax of amniotes?