Happy Birthday to Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809). At the end of On the Origin of Species (1859) he wrote:
…from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Probably not his first draft.
I love cartoons by Adam Douglas Thompson (@adamdthompson). When I saw this one, I immediately thought, “This is about evolution!”
None of the objects in Adam’s cartoon are doing the jobs they were designed to do. But somehow–surprisingly!–it all works and the sparkling “ends” are achieved.
Dr. Kat Arney, in her book, Herding Hemingway’s Cats, has a great analogy for the human genome–a garage full of junk.
It’s hard to admit that the heaps of stuff…lurking in the garage are just useless junk, rather than carefully selected treasures. Similarly, some people have found it hard to believe that our genome is not a show-home for neatly organized DNA.
Imagine you have a wobbly table. You go out to the garage, rummage around, and find something–a piece of cardboard–to stick under the table leg. The cardboard wasn’t intended for this purpose, but it works well enough. (It might end up staying there, propping up the table, for years.)
Similarly, when an organism has to adapt to new conditions it coops existing genes. These genes may have evolved to perform other functions in the organism, but, like the cardboard they work well enough to let the organism survive and reproduce. Like Adam’s cartoon, all that matters is the ends–survival of the organism–even if the means aren’t pretty.
Here are more of Adam’s cartoons. Follow him on Instagram and check out the prints in his store.