Stephen E. Jones wrote:
>The third story is perhaps the most interesting. It claims that by suppressing
>genes in beetle larvae, they grew extra legs. It seems to be saying that
>insects arose from centipedes by this mechanism. But that would seem to
>be a *loss* of genetic information?
Symmetrical segments are presumably all produced with the same genetic
information; It's most unlikely that symmetrical segments in long trains,
complete with identical soft-tissue infrastructure, evolved independently
such that all this symmetry is due to convergence or parallelism. So a larger
number of segments doesn't imply a greater amount of information.
>This would mean that all the information for the making of insects was
>already `front loaded' into centipedes?
Why would it mean this? If you truncate a centipede down to six legs,
you don't have an insect, you have a stubby centipede. Anyway, the
article said insects evolved from precursors with a centipede-like
structure, not from centipedes. The centipedes we know are themselves
specialized and evolved, possibly from the same precursor.
>But as my tagline quote says, "Aviation engineers look with
>envy on...insects" because their wings are far more efficient than aircraft
>wings.
There are so many things in nature which we can't duplicate mechanically,
what is the point here, other than good ol' personal incredulity? Are we
supposed to just sit and marvel, or are we supposed to puzzle things out?
--Cliff Lundberg ~ San Francisco ~ cliff@cab.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 03 2000 - 06:33:43 EDT