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Walking Before Flying

Posted by michael on from the all-that-is-old-is-new-again dept.

An anonymous reader writes "BYU biostaticians report in Nature their genetic analysis of the insect, known as the 'walking stick', which apparently gives a contrapuntal example of reversible evolution. Called Dollo's Law, the principle holds that the same evolutionary pathway can never be backtracked, because of random mutations. But this insect class first had wings, lost them, then got them back again. So what's next for some humans: a happy return to dragging their knuckles?"

4 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Contrapuntal? by MacAndrew · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Gee, I don't think I've ever heard the word contrapuntal. Thank you, another small step in the evolution of my vocabulary. :)

  2. rapping knuckles... by KDan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Unlikely. The genetic difference between an insect leg and insect wing (according to these articles, see Google News for a lot more sources that came out with this days ago) is very slight, the result of a single set of genes that switch between a leg and a wing. The difference between hairy quadruped apes and intelligent biped humans is a bit more pronounced... and there's no evolutionary pressure to make us devolve back to being quadrupeds (apart from that coming from the direction of good ole' Dubya).

    Daniel

    --
    Carpe Diem
  3. Laws of probability by xayide · · Score: 4, Insightful
    From the article:
    Dollo's Law ... is also known as the Law of Irreversible Evolution--which basically states that organisms cannot re-evolve along lost pathways, but must find alternative routes (because the same fortuitous train of mutational events, being totally random, will never repeat).
    I was not familiar with Dollo's Law before reading this story, and I may be misunderstanding some nuance or other... However, if mutations are truly random, isn't it necessary that they at least have the possibility to recreate a lost pathway, no matter how complex?
    1. Re:Laws of probability by barawn · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A "law" in science is more of an empirical observation - a guideline or principle. Kindof like Moore's Law. In general relativity, there's the "Law of Cosmic Censorship" which states that you can't have a singularity without an event horizon cloaking it. A much better mathematical term for what some scientists tend to use "law" for is "conjecture" or "principle".

      Is it poor wording? Yah, but using "law" to describe a proven theory is falling by the wayside, since very little is truly provable, so "law" is almost getting a comic connotation.

      Newton's third law is even pretty much a "conjecture", since we know the strong form of it isn't true in all cases, and while the weak is holding extremely well, it's entirely possible it may not be completely true.