Nearly Half Your Genome Isn't the Calm, Stable Inheritance You Picture

The tidy version of heredity goes like this: the DNA in your cells has been recombined in every generation through sex, picked up the occasional mutation, and on the whole been passed down reliably from your ancestors. Quanta Magazine notes that this is not the entire story. Nearly half of your genome, in its description, is mobile, repetitive, disruptive, even viral. So the genome is not simply an archive copied forward with small errors — a large share of what is being copied does not sit still.