10 Dec
2010
10 Dec
'10
7:58 p.m.
My favorite author on the subject is Stephen Gould. He wrote an article about how easily things can be "switched off". It seems that chickens don't have teeth but they have all the genetic information for their development with the absense of one emzyme needed during development. If chicken embryos are treated with this emzyme during a particular point in their development, the embryo starts to develop enamel. A spider in a cave might easily loose the ability to develop eyes from a single point mutation in the early growth stage, and a poplulation of blind spiders might easily develop offspring that mutate back to the origial sighted state. I suggest anyone interested in the subject look up the writing of Stephen J. Gould. DT