The latest gem from Carl Zimmer on a great new evo-devo story. [Gift link]
Nice excerpt:
It turns out that hands and feet were not the products of new genes doing new things. Rather, through natural selection, pieces of old genetic recipes for ancient body parts were cobbled together into new combinations.
“It’s much easier than if you had to build from scratch,” said Aurélie Hintermann, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, in Kansas City, Mo.
“Co-option of an ancestral cloacal regulatory landscape” is still illegal in eleven states— not to mention all that “deep homology”—and is about to be banned entirely by the Department of Agriculture despite a general anti-regulatory fever in Washington.
Next thing you know, someone will be complaining about spontaneous sex changes in clownfish as an example of liberal wokeism.