Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings by Richard Grossinger

Author:Richard Grossinger [Grossinger, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-698-5
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2012-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

There are so many variant, interdependent pathways among genes and proteins that developmental potential from mutations, recombinations, transpositions, codon jumbles, as well as overall systemic promiscuity and built-in thermodynamic uncertainty, can accumulate recessively for millennia with essentially no noticeable effect on the organism—no ill effect, no beneficial effect, no phenotypic consequences at all. Then, for mechanical or biochemical reasons, something may detonate, delivering alien offspring.

A simple mutative tweak in the relative timing of sequential gene transcriptions (heterochrony) can shuffle their entire organismic expression, turning a lineage of pre-apes into Homo erectus or, over many more generations, some ancestors of small crabs into beetles. The genes don’t change nearly as much as their relationships and synchronizations to one another do. What shifts is rhythm and relative chronology—the development of one embryonic organ or tissue node and expression with respect to another. Changes in timing can avalanche into changes in morphology, enough to generate a different species out of the same genetic strings. More often they leave nonviable concatenations in their wake.

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