Genetic Hammers
“When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.” Evolution can be viewed as a search algorithm; it attempts to explore the space of “all possible organisms” without wasting time on organisms that aren’t very successful. But it can’t just start anywhere- for a new species to evolve, it must descend from an existing species. The result is that you’ll often see situations like this- the same chain of DNA that controls how a species of fish grows its gill covers determines how our fingers grow.
“You have a common nail that’s used for many different pieces of furniture. This esoteric fish with this esoteric anatomical system is showing us something very fundamental about the evolutionary tree: that there’s a common process at work among disparate types of organisms. It’s basically showing that the limb story is part of a much more general narrative, which is the story of outgrowths. There’s a common development toolkit for all the outgrowths that we know in the body; they’re all versions of one another in a developmental sense.”
NIGHTNIGHT by DEDDY
