Am I missing something here? Here’s an article with the grand title of “Researchers propose expanded evolutionary concept”, which declares that we’re going to have to expand and rethink our understanding of evolutionary theory. “Oh really?” I thought, but I read it with an open mind, expecting some dramatic new phenomenon to be explained. I was a little disappointed to find it was about ramets.

Don’t get me wrong, ramets are interesting, and the paper’s content is fine, if maybe a little overhyped. Ramets are an asexual kind of reproduction, fairly common in plants, where runners sprout shoots that develop into individuals — a familiar example is aspen trees, where a clump of trees, even a whole forest, may consist of clones of a single source individual, each tree born of the original source root system, spawning more roots that generate more ramets that expand the clone.

The paper makes the good point that these organisms aren’t constrained by Weisman’s barrier, which postulates that there is no exchange of heritable variation from the soma to the gonads, which we animals take for granted. If your fingers were irradiated, producing a new collection of mutations in those tissues, it won’t matter to future offspring because those cells don’t contribute to sperm and egg. That would all change if you were able to sprout clonal copies of yourself from your fingertips, like these ramets, because then those irradiated digits would have a way to reproduce independent individuals. It would also be hard to type with all these finger-fetuses growing from my hands.

So in organisms with the ability to propagate from somatic tissues, somatic mutations are a mechanism for generating new variations. That’s the story here.

Yes, fine, this is an important phenomenon, but is it really new? Does it require bold new changes to evolutionary theory? In my head, I’m quite aware that asexual species can still evolve and acquire new traits, and that is perfectly compatible with the evolutionary principles I understand. There is often an erroneous bias in humans to assume that all populations reproduce sexually, like us, and that somatic tissues can’t propagate from cuttings, like us animals, but evolutionary theory isn’t blinkered in that way. Why is phys.org announcing we need an “expanded evolutionary concept” to account for this? We don’t. This could just be phys.org over-hyping something, as they tend to do.

But no, it’s actually in the paper itself. Oh no, it’s the dreaded paradigm shift.

Evolutionary biology has made tremendous progress in explaining the emergence and maintenance of sexual reproduction despite the two-fold costs of sex. Here, we addressed the flip side of the coin, namely, how do a large number of species cope with extended phases of asexual reproduction that, according to conventional wisdom, precludes the emergence of genetic and phenotypic diversity and hence, adaptive evolution? With empirical data increasingly confirming earlier conceptual work, it is now timely to suggest a paradigm shift that acknowledges the evolution of modular species at multiple levels. Cell lineages evolve within ramets, which in turn are forming asexual populations featuring a mix of mosaic and fixed SoGV. Both of these levels of variation and selection are, in turn, nested within sexually reproducing populations of genets that are corresponding to the ‘classical’ level of individuality in population genetics of unitary species, leading to potentially complex pathways of adaptation that merit further study.

Great, yes, I agree, multiple levels of selection, somatic mutation can contribute to genetic diversity, there’s nothing wrong or surprising about that. But where’s the “paradigm shift”? What’s the part that can’t be accommodated by our current understanding of genes and phenotypes and populations? Come on, people, tone down the exaggeration.

Unless there’s something I am missing here, which does happen. I may be a bit of an animal-chauvinist, so it feels awkward to have to remind a plant-person that evolutionary theory can handle bacteria quite well, so the peculiarities of our multicellular models aren’t necessarily going to require radical renovation of the whole idea.

This year’s physics Nobel goes to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi for “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warmings” and “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales” and for giving us something more to talk about in our Saturday podcast.

And yet, there are still people — Republicans, mainly, who I will grudgingly admit are still “people” — who deny the science.

Let’s be fair, though. There are also a lot of Democrats who are dragging their heels and refusing to do anything but the bare minimum they can get away with.

The Nobel in medicine this year goes to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their work in identifying the receptors that transduce heat and touch into signals in the nervous system.

So now you know the proximal sensors that are activated when you hug someone, or when you nibble on some ghost pepper. It’s TRPV and PIEZO channels!

Now they just have to figure out what’s going on in the central nervous system when those channels are triggered.

I knew it. For years I’ve seen the “dinosauroid” trotted out as an illustration of how dinosaurs could have evolved, if only that little space rock hadn’t messed up their progression. To me, it was symptomatic of a deplorable strain of teleological thinking in biology, and I thought it was totally bogus from the first glance.

Why would anyone think a coelurosaur would gradually converge on an anthropoid form? So much of our morphology is a consequence of variations in our ancestors — ancestors that would not have been shared with dinosaurs. Yet here is this imaginary beast with ape-like details. How would it have acquired those?

Darren Naish has tracked down the history of this bizarre mannequin, and I am totally not surprised: we can blame Teilhard de Chardin, who had a pernicious influence on Dale Russell, the scientist who built it.

I’m confident that another factor contributed to the construction of the dinosauroid, but it’s something more controversial than everything discussed so far and is also harder to establish with any degree of certainty. I think that Dale Russell’s specific personal views on the nature of the universe and the position of humans within it played a role in everything that happened.

We know from the recollections of his colleagues that Dale Russell was religious, with an active spiritual life committed to Catholicism. We also know from statements made by Robert Bakker and others who discussed religion with him that Russell was fond of the ideas of Jesuit priest and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin (Campagna 2001, p. 7, Noble 2016, p. 41). Chardin (1959) argued for a directionality in evolution, that humans represent a point close to (but not at) the pinnacle of evolution, and that a humanoid stage was inevitable for those organisms approaching evolution’s final stage. Add to this the fact that Russell stated in correspondence his idea that “the human form might be a natural target for selective pressures” (as Russell wrote to anthropologist Noel Boaz in August 1984), and his implication – made several times in interview – that humans (and, by extension, other humanoids) are not simply additional animals (Russell 1987, p. 130, Psihoyos & Knoebber 1994, p. 252). We’re talking here about what’s been called the ‘inevitable humanoid proposition’, a concept often linked both to religiosity and to an anthropocentric view of the universe.

My personal opinion is that the dinosauroid was not, then, the honest experiment in speculative evolution that some authors have implied (e.g., Losos 2017; reviewed here at TetZoo). Instead, Russell had already decided that he wanted to showcase the possibility that human-shaped non-humans were ‘inevitable’, and that they might have a special place in the design of the universe.

Do not, under any circumstances, ever try to read Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man. I did, and it was the closest real-world experience to the horror movie trope of reading the Necronomicon aloud in a cabin in the woods. It contains damnable prose and arcane leaps of logic that defy rational thought. It is infuriatingly stupid.

You’re all going to try and read it now, aren’t you?

Before you throw yourself into that pit of madness, at least read Peter Medawar’s review. Be forewarned. Make sure you have a chainsaw and a shotgun near at hand.

What’s weird, though, is how so many discussions of this idea are gentle, almost apologetic in addressing Teilhard de Chardin’s and Dale Russell’s strange religious bias. Don’t take this stuff seriously — it’s Time Cube level of wrong, pure garbage in defiance of the scientific consensus with no evidence to support their interpretation. Worse, that delicacy in treating the teleological imperative has had some embarrassing influence — Carl Sagan’s worst book, The Dragons of Eden, was rife with it.

Also infected with the Teilhard de Chardin disease: Simon Conway Morris. The tentacles of that mad Frenchman extend everywhere, bringing insanity to all who view them.

Behold, my nascent spider army:

Don’t worry, I do have a bigger incubator, a refrigerator-sized box upstairs where we usually rear our flies. We can keep their predators in the same box, right? It’ll keep the flies in line.

They’re old. The reason that they’re not as craggy and tall as the Rockies or the Himalayas or even the Cascades is because they’ve been eroding for 480 million years. Follow this Twitter thread for an entertaining geology lesson.

Have you ever wondered why we don’t find fossils in the Appalachian mountains?
The truth is, we do, they’re just not the kind of fossils you might think of—there are no mammals, no dinosaurs, no reptiles. There’s something else entirely. 🧵

— Alex (he/him) is fighting for trans kids ⚧🏳️‍⚧️ (@AlexPetrovnia) July 15, 2021

If only the rest of Twitter could be that informative!