An AI Trained on Fake Genomes Can Read the Geneology Written in Real Ones
Ben Sullivan
Run an AI model across a human chromosome and what you get back looks like a seismograph readout: peaks and troughs, quiet stretches interrupted by jagged eruptions of ancient time. The quiet zones are where evolution swept through recently, pushing all the variants in a population toward a single common ancestor. The peaks are where something else happened, something older and stranger, where competing versions of a gene have been kept alive for tens of millions of years, locked in...