In my last post, I mentioned that I was reading Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution and while I will highlight its major themes in a later post, I wanted to again briefly focus on one of its essays that I found fascinating. Developmental biologist H. Frederik Nijhout’s essay “The Ontogeny of Phenotype” (based on a 1997 paper) primarily argues that developmental pathways cannot be isolated from their genetic background, i.e., context matters, and the integration of developmental networks are also not cast in stone. There is a potential and remarkable fluidity to developmental systems that I was not previously aware of.
Development
Of Lobsters, Sticklebacks, and Google Chrome
The following is the last take-home essay for my developmental class. This essay is about the concept of modularity and how it is being used in biology today. It’s fairly basic stuff and if you are reading this blog, you probably know most of it already! I do hope you find the comparison to Google Chrome convincing though.
(This time we were urged to write in a more popular form so the writing is at a bit lower level and we didn’t have to source anything. I guess you can take what I say here with a grain of salt then. :P)
Book Review: Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean B. Carroll
Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean B Carroll is an excellent book. Both easy to read and understand in addition to containing some gorgeous pictures, Carroll makes his case for evo-devo clear and to the point. However, the book is not without its flaws, and I would like to discuss them here.
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Evo-devo of digital reduction in amphibians
Synopsis: Alberch and Gale: “A Developmental Analysis of an Evolutionary Trend: Digital Reduction in Amphibians” (1985). In this paper, the authors looked at different foot morphologies in extant amphibians and performed some experimental embryology with a few of the species. The induced developmental change followed the natural variation found by the authors! Details below!
Kestrels and Cerevisiae 