Pursuing praxis

So, SVP was lovely. Ottawa is a very beautiful city - plus I’m partial to cities on grand but not huge-and-muddy rivers, like Prague on the Vltava, Boston on the Charles, NYC on the Hudson. The conference was good; I made several contacts I needed to, and saw some cool talks. Jenny McG and I hung out with Megalosaur Roger from the UK, who saw my logic talk a couple months back while he was in town. Cool guy, though I definitely have trouble seeing through that whole British-persona thing. Anyway. A lot of talk, a lot of coffee and drinks, and far too many stories about things about people I didn’t need to know. Some very, very funny though. But that’s all I’ll say about that.

My trip on %*#@ing Delta was another matter, but no need to discuss that either. I still love traveling, although I had an eerie flash of fiction-recollection while I was arguing, dumbstruck, against the staggering ineptitude and un-thinking of several Delta employees - a flashback to the pre-Taggart-tunnel scene in AS. Just… no one home, everyone doing the run-around cuz it’s their job, too afraid to not blame Federal Regulations, to actually identify the immediate cause of the problem… But anyway. I do like Vogue magazine. And ear-plugs. And brainstorming on blank paper. Makes a five-hour flight go much faster.

I’ve decided to start a semi-regular series here - vignettes from evo-devo. Stuff you never knew you never knew. Development is so incredibly complex, powerful, and we’re just *just* scratching the surface of it. Genomics is to genetics what the arch was to piles of rocks. And genetics is to development what an untouched granite quarry is to an architect - pure creative potential, with no current way to predict the final product. So, given that the field of evo-devo is about 30 years old, and really on 15 years old if you look at the existence of major research programs - I thought I’d pass around the tray of Stories That Make You Go "Wow" "Whoa" and "Duuuuuuude…". No, that’s not the official title of the series. But it is 4am (7am eastcoast time) and I should get to bed. 

But - a quick view of what’s in store: tweak the flow of some signaling proteins in the embryo of a developing chicken, and you restore the fibula (small shin bone - which is long gone in all birds; it’s that tooth-pick like bone on the drumstick) and its articulation with the ankle joint in one fell swoop - and guess what? It looks like the set-up we see in Archaeopteryx. And then there’s the gain and loss of ancestral and adult traits throughout the development of… loads of taxa (i.e. critters) - therizinosaurs being the most recent example. Then there’s the bipedal goat story, round 2 of antlerogenesis (antler growth), the fin-lobe-limb embryo and fossil work (simply….. stunning; I wanted to work with these guys at Chicago, but I didn’t get into the program there). We could do the evolution of the flight stroke, but that’s pretty over-done. I want to do the stuff that’s not well-known. There’s all the bone biology stuff I’m learning… for class… tomorrow…

Time to go to bed.