Year: 2022

TWEEKS CAN BE PIVOTAL. "Studies show that minor molecular changes can provide major anatomical shifts, all of which might prove pivotal in evolution." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

VESTIGIAL TEETH GENES. "No living birds have teeth, but we can tweak regulatory genes of embryonic chicks to ‘switch on’ still-present structural genes that encode for teeth." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

SILENT TOOLKIT. "We can only speculate as to the evolutionary significance of ‘internal’ molecular mechanisms, which are often silent or neutral, whereas we can see, directly and immediately, the profound consequences of these shifts (on snail shells, fish limbs, hen’s teeth, and so on) in external phenotypes." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR VESTIGES. "Just as illnesses, injuries, and other accidents of ontogeny often leave remains in the form of scars where tissues have incompletely healed from damage, chance events of phylogeny can likewise leave ‘vestiges’ in the form of molecules and nucleic acid sequences that are non-functional (as might apply to ‘junk DNA’)." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

TWO VESTIGIAL SOURCES. "Both evolution and development might be said to leave vestigial remains not only in the phenotype we see, but also in the genotypic basis that helps to determine phenotypic expression (provided the genotypic changes are to the germ line, and thus heritable). Both kinds of vestiges result from solitary events in individual organisms." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

ISSUE OF INHERITANCE. "Crucial difference, however, is that whereas scars and other traces of injury (e.g., from regenerated limbs) remain a part of that organism, they are not passed along to the next generation, and in that essential sense they do not conform to a fundamental tenet of vestigiality as commonly understood." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

VESTIGIAL INHERITANCE. "Vestigial features are properties of species—they apply to all members of a species, and are inherited by offspring from parents—and thus they can evolve, or rather persist, as generally happens with a vestigial structure, process, or behavior." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

GENOTYPIC CHANGE. "In the truest (most literal) sense, then, vestigial features cannot be defined as remnants or residues of events that occur to individual organisms unless they alter the underlying DNA that is expressed in the phenotypic change, whether structural or behavioral." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

EVOLVING VESTIGES. "These underlying and inherited genetic instructions are essential for vestigiality. In the end, both phylogenetic vestiges and ontogenetic ‘vestiges’ evolve. Although there are central distinctions between evolution and development, ultimately even development—as a whole, and including every developmental process—evolves." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

OPPORTUNISTIC EVOLUTION. "Evolution is littered with examples of opportunism. Hosts infected by viruses found new uses for the genetic material the agents of disease left behind; metabolic enzymes somehow came to refract light rays through the eye’s lens; mammals took advantage of the sutures between the skull bones to help their young pass through the birth canal; and, in the signature example, feathers appeared in fossils before the ancestors of modern birds took to the skies." https://lnkd.in/d-P7wKZ View in LinkedIn