Endless Forms Most Beautiful

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom by Sean B. Carroll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't know how many articles I've read in the last 10+ years that have tried to explain some of the discoveries about how a cell "knows" it should become a liver cell or a skin cell and why we don't end up with shoulder blades in our kidneys. These articles got my level of understanding from "I bet it's complicated" to "It's complicated and has something to do with HOX genes."

Reading this book is the first time I feel I "got it"*, at least somewhat, but based on my own reading history I won't pretend I can explain in a couple sentences (or without embarrassing myself in some way or another with various factual errors--it's still complicated.) I will say it's amazing that scientists have figured out so much of how nature's evolutionary toolkit, used to fiddle with morphology over the eons. Those HOX genes are indeed at the center of it, and the discovery that humans and fruit flies share almost exactly identical core sequences is like discovering that the Egyptian hieroglyphics describing how to use an Ikea wrench to build the pyramids.



*Mutants, which I read last year, helped a bit too. A lot of the same science with a different approach.