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SO ENDS this excursion into Morning Glories and tulips, to be concluded next weekend. Humans have the capacity to obsess on floral beauty and the technical capacity to breed exotic varieties, to the enormous appetite of the public. Flowers are potent symbols with many meanings in many cultures. In both the Morning Glory and the tulip, mankind has collaborated with viral elements to generate these objects of obsession, at great cost and labor. And coming full circle, we now have a good handle on the biology of these flowers. View in LinkedIn

VESTIGIAL GENES. "What atavisms tell us is that what evolution has put away, development can quickly restore. Switches that turn off gene expression can turn back on, and hence these evolutionary remnants reveal the dynamic interplay between “ontogeny and phylogeny” that Gould expounded on." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

HEN'S TEETH. "Contrary to the well-known phrase, 'As rare as hens' teeth,' the researchers say they have found a naturally occurring mutant chicken called Talpid that has a complete set of ivories. The team, based at the Universities of Manchester and Wisconsin, have also managed to induce teeth growth in normal chickens -- activating genes that have lain dormant for 80 million years." https://lnkd.in/dzSQugZ View in LinkedIn

ATAVISMS. Chick embryo gill arches plus mouse molar tissue mosaics grafted into the eyes of nude mice (immunologically privileged sites that permit foreign tissues) formed complete teeth. Activation of vestigial ancient genes. https://lnkd.in/dxQA6w3 View in LinkedIn

ANCESTRAL HORSES had four toes in the front and three in the back, and even earlier horses may have had five toes on each foot. "Modern horses retain but a single toe. They also develop vestiges of the old second and fourth toes as short splints of bone mounted high and inconspicuously above the hoof." Some mutant horses actually grow extra toes. https://lnkd.in/dxQA6w3 View in LinkedIn

HISTORICAL REMNANTS. "Retained tails in humans, or external hindlimbs in cetaceans and snakes—lost from ancestors but present again—are other telltale clues to organismal history, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic, as are the re-emergent “hen’s teeth and horse’s toes” that Gould made famous in his book of the same name." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTIONARY THROWBACKS. "When a formerly lost trait re-emerges in ‘throwback’ form, the resulting atavism (from the Latin atavus for ancestor, or literally great-great-great grandfather) is a kind of re-appearing artifact." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

The supermarket food gamble may be up View in LinkedIn

WEBBED FEET. "The webbing between digits of a foot, as in waterfowl like the flightless cormorant, generally reflects the lack of such cell death and thus reveals the largely unaltered embryonic limb bud as a sort of simple ontogenetic artifact, yet one that is still obviously functional as a webbed foot and that bears too on the evolution of the taxon when viewed in comparison with related taxa (e.g., a duck’s foot vs. a chicken’s)." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

COMPOUND CLUES. "Another example of compound historical clues, apoptosis (programmed cell death) typically transforms a paddle-like vertebrate limb bud into a hand or foot with distinct, discrete digits." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn