I was asked to contribute to Forbes Magazine package on commuting — never mind that I live across the street from my job, and “commuting” has become a trivial, alien concept — so I had to talk about animals that commute.
It seems to be an evolving tradition around here to put descriptions of our medical adventures online. Janet contributes with a an account of her recent mammogram. I was disappointed — there are no pictures.
Hey! I’m scheduled to have a colonoscopy late next month! Shall I…?
Life has two contradictory properties that any theory explaining its origin must encompass: similarities everywhere, and differences separating species. So far, the only theory that covers both beautifully and explains how one is the consequence of the other is evolution. Common descent unites all life on earth, while evolution itself is about constant change; similarities are rooted in our shared ancestry, while differences arise as lineages diverge.
Now here’s a new example of both phenomena: the development of segmentation in snakes. We humans have 33 vertebrae, zebrafish have 30-33, chickens have 55, mice have 65, and snakes have up to 300 — there’s about a ten-fold range right there. There are big obvious morphological and functional differences, too: snakes are sinuous slitherers notable for their flexibility, fish use their spines as springs for side-to-side motion, chickens fuse the skeleton into a bony box, and humans are upright bipeds with backaches. Yet underlying all that diversity is a common thread, that segmented vertebral column.
The similarities are a result of common descent. The differences, it turns out, arise from subtle changes in developmental timing.
This is a long streaming video, so you might want to save it for something to watch over lunch. Mark Norman takes a giant squid apart at the Melbourne Museum.
We’ve heard the arguments about the relative importance of mutations in cis regulatory regions vs. coding sequences in evolution before — it’s the idea that major transitions in evolution were accomplished more by changes in the timing and pattern of gene expression than by significant changes in the genes themselves. We developmental biologists tend to side with the cis-sies, because timing and pattern are what we’re most interested in. But I have to admit that there are plenty of accounts of functional adaptation in populations that are well-founded in molecular evidence, and the cis regulatory element story is weaker in the practical sense that counts most in science (In large part, I think that’s an artifact of the tools — we have better techniques for examining expressed sequences, while regulatory elements are hidden away in unexpressed regions of the genome. Give it time, the cis proponents will catch up!)
This morning, I was sent a nice paper that describes a pattern of functional change in an important molecule — there is absolutely no development in it. It’s a classic example of an evolutionary arms race, though, so it’s good that I mention this important and dominant side of the discipline of evolutionary biology — I know I leave the impression that all the cool stuff is in evo-devo, but there’s even more exciting biology outside the scope of my tunnel vision. Also, this paper describes a situation and animals with which I am very familiar, and wondered about years ago.
