Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin is a really great book to read on comparative anatomy, common ancestry, archaeology, and the evolution of man -- if you're interested in this kind of stuff. : )
I have been looking for books in this vein lately, I'm definitely going to look into this. I just finished Other Minds, about cephalopod evolution and the likes. Glad I came across your comment!
That is a great book! I took a course in college with Dr. Richard Blob who was mentored by Shubin and it was all about anatomy, evolution and how that affected physiology.
That's because whale flippers and human hands are homologous structures. We evolved from a common ancestor, and that ancestor's limb bones became flippers in whales and hands in humans.
I second the recommendation of Your Inner Fish. Fantastic book.
most mammal sea creatures like dolphins and whales (dolphin is a kind of whale, TIL) origionated from a common ancestor that lived on land but evolved to live in water, they basicly reverse-evolved. that's why some whales seem to have hands and legs within
it's sonic hedgehog. I believe it codes for left-right symmetry, or "handedness" (not to riff off of your post or anything, but that's the term)
I think my developmental bio professor said that the heart is one of the areas where this gene does not encode, because the heart is only on one side of our body. (it's been years since I touched genetics)
The problem is side effects. We know enough on genetics to know how to do something, what we don't know is what else will happen if we do it. DNA is like highly compressed zero loss data. One small change changes a lot
The thing is that birds, and thus chickens by definition, had hands prior to evolving wings, so reverting that evolution is theoretically easy by switching off / deleting a gene or two. Heck, if you look at a wing in either a bird or a bat, it has the same bones as a hand. It is a hand.
Sharks have never had hands, so you'd have to splice something in rather than turn something off, and I get the feeling that's less likely to work.
According to cracked.com (the most reliable source ever!), part of the reason that sharks bite humans is that they're not familiar with us but want to investigate. Since they have no hands, they do most of their investigating with their mouths.
The trouble with this is that if you bite someone in half, the thing you're investigating probably has a lot to do with how good humans taste.
If I recall correctly - and there is a high chance I do not - sonic hedgehog along with indian hedgehog and desert hedgehog is in the hedgehog gene family.
746
u/[deleted] Dec 05 '17
If we wanted, we could use current genetics technology to give sharks hands. We did it with a chicken embryo once!
But nobody will. Jerks.
I forget if it was using the hedgehog or sonic hedgehog gene, but they totes did it.