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Jan. 26th, 2005 07:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zdashamberEh, sometimes you get real science, sometimes you get whack-ass theorizing. This is one of the second times.
Today I was talking at dinner with Silent E. After flipping my drumstick and fiddling with it with the chopsticks to try to get all the meat off, my attention was drawn to the little bone that accompanies it. I'm constantly interested in the vagaries of skeletal structure across species, and it occurred to me that what I was looking at was the chicken equivalent of our lower leg; so the little accompaning bone was a vestigal version of the double-bone structure of our lower limb-halves.
We discussed chicken feet for a bit (nearly impossible to eat with chopsticks; to eat them at all you really need to hold them with your fingers; so it's a good thing that holding your food with your hands is a bad thing to do), and a whack-ass supposition occurred to me: I suppose that the first limbed critter had only one bone and then fingers at the end of it. Then a mutation occurred such that its fingers had fingers, and then the original fingers grew together into a forearm, shedding all but two of their number.
Sounds weird, eh, fingers growing on fingers, a very creepy mutation, but look at your hand—it's happening again. The fingers that once, perhaps, grew on the end of your forearm (when you were a lizard, say) are now bundled together into your palm, and new fingers have grown out of the end of that.
The logical conclusion is that in the future we will have tentacles: long multi-jointed arms.
Now, a possible counter to this is that I suspect arms and legs are grown from the same genes. How else would they be so exactly alike? It explains the above mutation pattern well: there would be one gene that, in the development process, says, "Whoo-hoo! Let's put some fingers on this!" A mutation, and it steps out of its place in line (after the gene that says "Whoo-hoo! Let's put a forearm in here!" and before the gene that says "Alright, guys, enough with the adding of tissue, already...") and adds another set of fingers. This isn't whackass; so far as I recall from college, this is how development works, genes working in sequence to stop the action of the previous one and do their own thing until they're stopped themselves.
But unlike tentacular arms, tentacular legs don't seem to me to be something that would be selected for. With our focus on walking, our toes seem to me to have reached the apex of their evolution. So unless something happens that unlinks arms from legs in development, probably no tentacular arms. Pity.
Now, Silent E speaks up saying that she'd rather have another set of arms than another set of fingers. "I know! A third arm would be so vastly useful!" Many a time I've wished to steady something and do stuff to it at the same time. E suggests, "Or a tail..." Right! We already the base for a tail... 'Twould be a simple upgrade!
We discussed how there would be bars over toilets so old people could hold on to something and little kids wouldn't have to worry about falling in. We talked about how the tails would look. E wasn't keen on the idea of just skin, so I suggested they could have hair, just like that on your head. E was also not keen on this... More to shed. She suggested scales. I opined that I'd rather have just skin than scales. The object is to not have them look like rat tails. I think rat tails are scaly, but I don't remember precisely.
E is applying to library grad schools in Ann Arbor or Boston for this fall. Who knows, I may go with; I do dislike my job, after all, and Ann Arbor is a hotbed of Amber. I asked E if she'd think it very strange if I did; "Not at all!" she replied. "I was thinking about what a pain it would be to have to separate out the library..."
Today I was talking at dinner with Silent E. After flipping my drumstick and fiddling with it with the chopsticks to try to get all the meat off, my attention was drawn to the little bone that accompanies it. I'm constantly interested in the vagaries of skeletal structure across species, and it occurred to me that what I was looking at was the chicken equivalent of our lower leg; so the little accompaning bone was a vestigal version of the double-bone structure of our lower limb-halves.
We discussed chicken feet for a bit (nearly impossible to eat with chopsticks; to eat them at all you really need to hold them with your fingers; so it's a good thing that holding your food with your hands is a bad thing to do), and a whack-ass supposition occurred to me: I suppose that the first limbed critter had only one bone and then fingers at the end of it. Then a mutation occurred such that its fingers had fingers, and then the original fingers grew together into a forearm, shedding all but two of their number.
Sounds weird, eh, fingers growing on fingers, a very creepy mutation, but look at your hand—it's happening again. The fingers that once, perhaps, grew on the end of your forearm (when you were a lizard, say) are now bundled together into your palm, and new fingers have grown out of the end of that.
The logical conclusion is that in the future we will have tentacles: long multi-jointed arms.
Now, a possible counter to this is that I suspect arms and legs are grown from the same genes. How else would they be so exactly alike? It explains the above mutation pattern well: there would be one gene that, in the development process, says, "Whoo-hoo! Let's put some fingers on this!" A mutation, and it steps out of its place in line (after the gene that says "Whoo-hoo! Let's put a forearm in here!" and before the gene that says "Alright, guys, enough with the adding of tissue, already...") and adds another set of fingers. This isn't whackass; so far as I recall from college, this is how development works, genes working in sequence to stop the action of the previous one and do their own thing until they're stopped themselves.
But unlike tentacular arms, tentacular legs don't seem to me to be something that would be selected for. With our focus on walking, our toes seem to me to have reached the apex of their evolution. So unless something happens that unlinks arms from legs in development, probably no tentacular arms. Pity.
Now, Silent E speaks up saying that she'd rather have another set of arms than another set of fingers. "I know! A third arm would be so vastly useful!" Many a time I've wished to steady something and do stuff to it at the same time. E suggests, "Or a tail..." Right! We already the base for a tail... 'Twould be a simple upgrade!
We discussed how there would be bars over toilets so old people could hold on to something and little kids wouldn't have to worry about falling in. We talked about how the tails would look. E wasn't keen on the idea of just skin, so I suggested they could have hair, just like that on your head. E was also not keen on this... More to shed. She suggested scales. I opined that I'd rather have just skin than scales. The object is to not have them look like rat tails. I think rat tails are scaly, but I don't remember precisely.
E is applying to library grad schools in Ann Arbor or Boston for this fall. Who knows, I may go with; I do dislike my job, after all, and Ann Arbor is a hotbed of Amber. I asked E if she'd think it very strange if I did; "Not at all!" she replied. "I was thinking about what a pain it would be to have to separate out the library..."