I was showing pictures from a book called "The new Science of Evo Devo-Endless forms most beautiful" authored by Sean B.Carroll to my sister and she caught me smiling while looking at one of the pictures.
Here it is.
Here it is.
Left is a normal fly head with antennae. Right is a mutant fly in which the antennae are transformed into legs. (Photos courtesy of Dr Rudy Turner, Indiana University)
Isn't it strange to smile at photographs of flyheads?
Was I amused or was I fascinated? Or have I gone... ...mad?
Mad I wasn't but I sure am fascinated. How on earth did the leg get there? How could changing just one gene change a body so dramatically?
Stay tuned to evodevos.blogspot for the next blogpost.
2 comments:
Not mad at all; this is a fascinating area. The discovery of Hox genes is still one of the most important and robust findings in evo-devo.
However, a large change like this is unlikely to be the way how morphological evolution happened in Nature, because of the drastic reduction in reproductive fitness of such mutants.
The idea that evolution can take large steps like this was proposed in Richard Goldschmidt's "hopeful monster" hypothesis. Unfortunately it is not supported by evidence. Modern evolutionary theories such as (neo)selectionism, neutral drift and (neo)mutationalism all emphasize small steps.
Oh, and here are the links for the two other Singaporean science blogs (excluding mine):
Rat in the Lab (Physics)
http://ratinthelab.wordpress.com
Biology Refugia (Biology)
http://staff.science.nus.edu.sg/~sivasothi/biorefugia/
Now for the top science blogs in the world...
Pharyngula (Biology)
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/
Bad Astronomy (Physics)
http://www.badastronomy.com/
Not super-popular, but a great resource in the war between selectionists and pluralists...
Sandwalk (Biochemistry)
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com
Enjoy!
Dr. Carroll was recently interview by the National Science Teachers Association.
Check it out:
http://www.nsta.org/laboutloud
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