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Evolution as a pachinko history: what is 'random'?

We discussed a Japanese pachinko machine in an earlier post, a pinball machine, as an example of the difference between randomness and determinism, in an evolutionary context.   Here we want to use pachinko machine imagery in a different way.

The prevailing, often unstated but just-under-the-surface assumption is that every trait in life is here because of natural selection.  Of course, for a trait to be here at all, bearers of its ancestral states up to the present (or, at least, the recent past) were successful enough to have reproduced.  It would not be here if it were otherwise, unless, for example, it's itself harmful, or without function but connected to a much better, related trait since genes are usually used in many different bodily contexts and may be associated with both beneficial and harmful traits.  Most sensible evolutionary geneticists know that many or even most sites in genomes tolerate variation that has either no effect or effects so small that in realistic population sizes they change in frequency essentially by chance.





However, the widespread default assumption that there must be an adaptive explanation for every trait usually also tacitly assumes that probabilism doesn't make much difference.  Some alert evolutionary biologists will acknowledge that one version among contemporary but equivalent versions of a trait can evolve by chance relative to other versions.  But the insistence, tacit or expressed, is that natural selection, treated essentially as a force, is responsible.  The very typical view is that the trait arose because of selection 'for' it, and that's why it's here.  And speaking of 'here', here's where a pachinko analogy may be informative.

If a bevy of metal balls tumbles through the machine, each bouncing off the many pins, they will end up scattered across the bottom ledge of the machine (the gambling idea is to have them end up in a particular place, but that's not our point here).  So let's take a given ball and ask 'Why did it end up where it did?"





The obvious and clearly true answer is 'Gravity is responsible'.  That is the analogue of 'selection is responsible'.   But it is rather an empty answer.  One can always say that what's here must be here because it was favored (that is, not excluded) by fitness considerations: its ancestral bearers obviously reproduced!  We can define that as 'adaptation' and indeed in a sense that is what is done every day, almost thoughtlessly.

Gravity is, like the typical if tacit assumption about natural selection, a deterministic force for all practical purposes here.  But why did this ball end up in this particular place?  One obvious answer is that each starts out in a slightly different place at the top, and no two balls are absolutely identical. However, each ball makes a different path from the top to the bottom of the obstacle course it faces. Yes, it is gravity that determines that they go down (adapt), but not how they go down.

In fact, each ball takes a different path, zigging and zagging at each point based on what happens, essentially by chance, at that point.   This one might think of as local ecosystems on the evolutionary path of any organism, that are beyond its control.  So, in the end, even if the entire journey is deterministic, in the sense that every collision is, the result is not one that can, in practice, be understood except by following the path of each ball (each trait, in the biological analogy).  And this means that the trajectory cannot be predicted ahead of time. And in turn, this means that our interpretation of what a trait we see today was selected 'for' is often if not usually either basically just a guess or, more often, equates what the trait does today to what it was selected to be, expressed as if it were an express train from then to now.

And this doesn't consider another aspect of the chaotic and chance-affected nature of evolutionary adaptation: the interaction with the other balls bouncing around at the same time in such an obstacle course.  Collisions are in every meaningful sense in the game of life, if not pachinko, chance events that affect selective ones, even were we to assume that selection is simple, straightforward, and deterministic.

The famous argument by Gould and Lewontin that things useful for one purpose, such as 'spandrels' in cathedral roofs, are incidental traits that provide the options for future adaptations--life exploits today with what yesterday produced for whatever reason even if just by chance.  The analogy or metaphor has been questioned, but that is not important here.  What is important is that contingencies of this nature are chance events, relative to what builds on them.  Selectionism as a riposte to creationism is fine but hyper-selectionism becomes just another often thought-free dogma.  Darwin gave us inspiration and insight, but we should think for ourselves, not in 19th century terms.

A far humbler, and far less 'Darwinian' (but not anti-Darwinian!), explanation of life is called for if we really want to understand evolution as a subtle often noisy process, rather than as a faith.  Instead, even serious biologists freely invent--and that's an apt word for it--selective accounts, as if true explanations, for almost any trait one might mention. It's invented because some reason is imagined without any direct evidence other than present-day function, but then treated as if directly observed, which is rarely possible. Here is an interview that I just came across that in a different way makes some of the same points we are trying to make here.

Everything here today is 'adaptive' in the sense that it has worked up to now.  Everything here today is also a 4 billion year successful lineage, that all made its way through the pachinko pins.  But these are almost vacuous tautologies.  Understanding life requires understanding one's biases in trying to force simple solutions on complicated reality.

Darwin the Newtonian. Part V. A spectrum, not a dogma

Our previous installments on genetic drift (a form of chance) vs natural selection (a deterministic force-like phenomenon) and the degree to which evolution is due to each (part 1 here) lead to a few questions that we thought we'd address to end this series.

First, there is no sense in which we are suggesting that complex traits arise out of nowhere, by 'chance' alone.  There is no sense in which we are suggesting that screening for viability or utility does not occur as a regular part of evolution.  But we are asking what the nature of that screening is, and what a basically deterministic, Newtonian view of natural selection, that is we believe widely if often tacitly held, implies and how accurate it may be.

It's also important here to point out something that is obvious.  The dynamics of evolution from both trait and genome level comprise a spectrum of processes, not a single one that should be taken as dogma.  A spectrum means that there is a range of relative roles of what can be viewed as determinism and chance that the two are not as distinct as may seem, and that even identifying, much less proving what is going on in a given situation is often dicey.  Some instances of strong selection, like some of chance seem reasonably clear and those concepts are apt.  But much, perhaps most, of evolution is a more subtle mix of phenomena and that is what we are concerned with.

Secondly, we have discussed our view of natural selection before, in various ways.  In particular, we cite our series on what we called the 'mythology' of selection, a term we used to be provocative in the sense of hopefully stimulating readers to think about what many seem to take for granted.  Yes, we're repeating ourselves some, but think the issues are important and our ideas haven't been refuted in any serious way so we think they're worth repeating.

A friend and former collaborator took exception to our assumption that people still believe that what we see today is what was the case in the past.  He felt we were setting up a straw man. The answer is somewhat subjective, but we believe that if you read many, many descriptions of current function and their evolution, you'll see that they are often if not usually just equated de facto with being 'adaptations', and that means that doing what they do now came about because it was favored by the force of selection in the past.  We think it's not a straw man at all, but a description of what is being said by many people much of the time: very superficial, dogmatic assumptions both of determinative selection and that we can infer the functional reason.

Of course everyone acknowledges that earlier states had their own functions and today's came from earlier, and that functions change (bat wings used to be forelegs, e.g.), but the idea is that bat flight is here because the way bats fly was selected for.  One common metaphor going back to an article by Lewontin and Gould is that evolution works via 'spandrels', traits evolved for one purpose or incidentally part of some adaptation, that are then usable by evolution to serve some new function. Yes, evolution works through changing traits, but how often are they 'steps' in this sense or is the process more like a rather erratic escalator, if we need a metaphor?

There are ways for adaptive traits to arise that have nothing to do with Darwinian competition for limited resources, and are perfectly compatible with a materialist view.  Organismal selection occurs when organisms who 'like' a particular part of their environment, tend to hang out there.  They'll meet and mate with others who are there as well.  If the choice has to do with their traits--ability to function at high altitude, or whatever--then over time this trait will become more common in this niche compared to their peers elsewhere, and eventually mating barriers may arise, and a new species with what appears to be a selected adaptation. But no differential reproduction is required--no natural selection.  It's natural assortment instead.

All aspects of our structure and function depend on interaction among molecules.  If two molecules must interact for some function to occur, then mutant versions may not serve that purpose and the organism may perish. This would seem most important during embryonic development.  An individual with incompatible molecular interactions (due to genetic mutation) would simply not survive.  This leaves the population with those whose molecules do interact, but there is no competition involved--no natural selection.  It's natural screening instead.

Natural selection of the good ol' Darwinian kind can occur, leading to complex adaptations in just the way Darwin said 150+ years ago.  But if the trait is the result of very many genes, the individual variants that contribute may be invisible to selection, and hence come and go essentially by chance. This is what we have called phenogenetic drift.  Do you doubt that?  If so, then why is it that most complex traits that are mapped can take on similar values in individuals with very different genotypes?  This is, if anything, the main bottom line finding of countless very large and extensive mapping studies, in humans and even bacteria.  This is basically what Andreas Wagner's work, that we referred to earlier in the series, is about.   It rather obviously implies that which of equivalent variants proliferates is the result of chance.  There's nothing non-Darwinian about this.  It's just what you'd expect instead.

We'd expect this because the many factors with which any species must deal will challenge each of its biological systems. That means many screening factors (better we think than calling them selection 'pressures' as would usually be done).  Most of these are affected by multiple genes.  Genes vary within a population.  If any given factor's effects were too strong, it would threaten the species' existence.  At least, most must be relatively weak at any given time, even if persisting over very long time periods.  Multiple traits, multiple contributing genes in this situation means that relative to any one trait or gene, the screening must be rather weak.  That in turn means that chance affects which variant proliferates.  There's nothing non-Darwinian about this.  It's essentially why he stressed the glacial slowness of evolution.

There is, however, the obvious fact that known functional parts of DNA are far less variable than regions with no known function.  This can be, and usually is assumed to be, the expected evidence of Darwinian natural selection.  But factors like organismal dispersion or functional (embryonic) adequacy can account for at least some of this.  Longer-standing genes and genetic systems would be expected to be more entrenched because they can acquire fewer differences before they won't work with other elements in the organism.  This is at least compatible with the view we've expressed, and there could be some ways of testing the explanation.

This view means we need not worry about whether a variant is 'truly' neutral in the face of environmental screening.  We could even agree that there's no testable sense in which a variant evolves by 'pure' chance. Even very tiny differences in real function can evolve in a way that is statistically 'neutral'.  Again, this can be the case even if the trait to which such variants contribute is subject to clear natural or other forms of selection.

This view is also wholly compatible with the findings of GWAS, the evidence that every trait is affected by genetic variation to some extent, the fact that organisms are adapted to their environment in many ways and the fact that prediction based on genotyping is often a problematic false promise.  And because this is a spectrum, randomly generated by mutation, some variants and or traits they affect will be very harmful or helpful--and will look like strong, force-like natural selection.  These variants and traits led to Mendel, and led to the default if often tacit assumption that natural selection is the force that explains everything in life.

Further, it is important for all the same sorts of reasons that the shape of the spectrum--the relative amount of a given level of complexity--is not based on any distribution we know of and hence is not predictable, generally because it is the result of a long history of random and local context and contingencies, of various unknown strength and frequency (about the past, we can estimate a distribution but that doesn't mean we understand any real underlying probabilistic process that caused what we see).  This is interesting, because many aspects of genetic variation (and of the tree of life) can be fitted to a reasonable extent to various probability distributions (see Gene Koonin's paper or his book The Logic of Chance).  But these really aren't causal parametric 'laws' in the usual sense, but descriptions after the fact without rigorous causal characteristics.  Generally, prediction of the future will be weak and problematic.

In the view of life we've presented, evolution will have characteristics that are weak or unpredictable directional tendencies, and the same for genetic specificities (and hence predictive power). It is the trait that is in a sense predictable, not the effects of individual genes.

We think this view of evolution is compatible with the observed facts but not with many of the simplified ideas that are driving life sciences at present.

Our viewpoint is that the swarm of factors environmental and genomic means that chance is a major component even of functional adaptations, in the biodesic paths of life.

Darwin the Newtonian. Part IV. What is 'natural selection'?

If, as I suggested yesterday, genetic drift is a rather unprovable or even metaphysical notion, then what is the epistemological standing of its opposite: not-drift?  That concept implies that the reproductive success of the alternative genotypes under consideration is not equal. But since we saw yesterday that showing that two things are exactly equal is something of a non-starter, how different is its negation?  

Before considering this, we might note that to most biologists, those who think and those who just invoke explanations, non-drift means natural selection.  That is what textbooks teach, even in biology departments (and in schools 
of medicine and public health, where simple-Simon is alive and well). But natural selection implies systematic, consistent favoring of one variant over others, and for the same reason.  That is by far the main rationale for the routine if unstated assumption that today's functions or adaptations are due to past selection for those same functions: we observe today and retroactively extrapolate to the past.  It's understandable that we do that, and it was a major indirect way (along with artificial selection) in which Darwin was able to reconstruct an evolutionary theory that didn't require divine ad hoc creation events.   But there are problems with this sort of thinking--and some of them have long been known, even if essentially stifled by what amounts to a selectionist ideology, that is, a rather unquestioning belief in a kind of single-cause worldview.

What does exactly not-zero mean?
I suggested yesterday that drift, meaning exactly no systematic difference between states (like genotypes) was so illusive as to be essentially philosophical.  But zero-difference is a very specific value and may thus be especially hard to prove.  But non-zero is essentially an open-ended concept and might thus be trivially easy to show.  But it's not!

One alternative to two things being not zero is simply that they have some difference.  But need that difference be specifiable or of a fixed amount?  Need it be constant or similar over instances of time and place?  If not, we are again in rather spooky territory, because not being identical is not much if any help in understanding.  One wants to know by how much, and why--and if it's consistent or a fluke of sample or local circumstance.  But this is not a fixed set of things to check.

Instead of just 'they're different', what is usually implicitly implied is that the genotypes being compared have some particular, specific fitness difference amount, not just that they differ. That is what asserting different functional effects of the variants largely implies, because otherwise one is left asserting that they are different....sort of, sometimes, and this isn't very satisfying or useful.  It would be normal, and sensible, to argue that the difference need not be precisely, deterministically constant, because there's always a luck component, and ecological conditions change.  But if the difference varies widely among circumstances, it is far more difficult to make persuasive 'why' explanations. For example, small differences favoring variant A over variant B in one sample or setting might actually favor B over A in other times or places.  Then selection is a kind of willy-nilly affair--which probably is true!--but much more difficult to infer in a neat way, because it really is not different from being zero on average (though 'on average' is also easier to say than to account for causally).  If a difference is 'not zero', there are an infinity of ways that might be so, especially if it is acknowledged to be variable, as every sensible evolutionary biologist would probably agree is the case.

But then looking for causes becomes very difficult because among all the variants in a population, and all the variation in individual organisms' experience means that there may be an open-ended  number of explanations one would have to test to account for an observed small fitness difference between A and B.  And that leads to serious issues about statistical 'significance' and inference criteria.  That's because most alleged fitness differences are essentially local and comparative.  In turn that means the variant is not inherently selected but is context-dependent: fitness doesn't have a universal value, like, say, G, the universal Newtonian gravitational constant in physics, and to me that means that even an implicitly Newtonian view of natural selection is mistaken as a generality about life. 

If selection were really force-like in that sense, rather than an ephemeral, context-specific statistical estimate, its amount (favoring A over B) should approach the force's parameter, analogous to G, asymptotically: the bigger the sample and greater the number of samples analyzed the closer the estimated value would get to the true value.  Clearly that is not the way life is, even in most well-controlled experimental settings.  Indeed, even Darwin's idea of a constant struggle for existence is incompatible with that idea.

There are clearly many instances in which selective explanations of the classical sort seem specifically or even generally credible.  Infectious disease and the evolution of resistance is an obvious example.  Parallel evolution, such as independent evolution of, say, flight or similar dog-like animals in Australia and Africa, may be taken to prove the general theory of adaptation to environments.  But what about all the not dogs in these places?  We are largely in ad hoc explanatory territory, and the best of evolutionary theory clearly recognizes that.

So, in what sense does natural selection actually exist?  Or neutrality?  If they are purely comparative, local, ad hoc phenomena largely demonstrable only by subjective statistical criteria, we have trouble asserting causation beyond constructing Just-So stories.  Even with a plausible mechanism, this will often be the case, because plausibility is not the same as necessity.  Just-So stories can, of course, be true....but usually hard to prove in any serious sense.

Additionally, in regard to adaptive traits within or between populations or species, if genetic causation is due to contributions of many genes, as typically seems to be the case, there is phenogenetic drift, so that even with natural selection working force-like on a trait, there may be little if any selection on specific variants in that mix: even if the trait is under selection, a given allelic variant may not be.

Some other slippery issues
Natural selection is somewhat strange.  It is conceptually a passive screen of variation, but often treated as if an inherent property of a genotype (or an allele), whose value is determined on what else is in the same locus in the population.  Yet it's also treated as if this is inherent and unchanging property of the genotype...until any competing genotypes disappear.  As the favored allele becomes more common, its amount of advantage will increasingly vary because, due to recombination and mutation, the many individuals carrying the variant will also vary in the rest of their genomes, which will introduce differences in fitness among them (likewise, early on most carriers of the favored 'A' variant will be heterozygotes, but later on more and more will be homozygotes).  When the A variant becomes very common in the population, its advantage will hardly be detectable since almost all its peers fellws will have the same genotype at that site.  Continued adaptation will have to shift to other genes, where there still is a difference.  Some AA carriers will have detrimental variants at another gene, say B, and hence reduced fitness. Relatively speaking, some A's, or eventually maybe all A's, will have become harmful, because even in classical Darwinian terms selection is only relative and local.  So, selection even in the force-like sense, is very non-Newtonian, because it is so thoroughly context-dependent.  

Another issue is somatic mutation.  The genotypes that survive to be transmitted to the next generation are in the germ line.  But every cell division induces some mutations, and depending on when and where during development or later life a mutation occurs, it could affect the traits of the individual.  Even if selection were a deterministic force, it screens on individuals and hence that includes any effects of somatic mutation in those individuals.  But somatic mutations aren't inherited, so even if the mechanism is genetic their effects will appear as drift in evolutionary terms.  

Most models of adaptive selection are trait-specific.  But species do not evolve one trait at a time, except perhaps occasionally when a really major stressor sweeps through (like an epidemic).  Generally, a population is always subject to a huge diversity of threats and opportunities, contexts and changes.  Every one of our biological systems is always being tested, of in many ways at once. Traits are also often correlated with one another, so pushing on one may be pulling on another.  That means that even if each trait were being screened for separate reasons, the net effect on any one of the must typically be very very small, even if it is Newtonian in its force-like nature.  

The result is something like a Japanese pachinko machine.  Pachinko is popular type of gambling in Japan. A flurry of small metal balls bounces down from the top more or less randomly through a jungle of pins and little wheels, before finally arriving at the bottom.  The balls bounce off each other on the way in basically random collisions. The payoff (we could say it's analogous to fitness) is based on the balls that, after all this apparent chaos, end up in a particular pocket at the bottom.  In biological analogy, each ball can represent a different trait or perhaps individuals in a population. They bounce around rather randomly, constrained only by the walls and objects there--nothing steers them specifically. What's in the pocket is the evolutionary result. 

Pachinko machine (from Google images)
 (you can easily find YouTube videos showing pachinkos in action)

All similes limp, and these collisions are probably in truth deterministic, even if far too too complex to predict the outcome.  Nonetheless, this sort of dynamics among individuals with their differing genes of varying and context-specific effects, in diverse and complex environments, suggests why in this dynamic complex, change related to a given trait will be a lot like drift; there are so many that if each were too strongly force-like extinction would be more likely the result.  Further, since most traits are affected by many parts of the genome, the intensity of selection on any one of them must be reduced to be close to the expectations of drift. Adaptive complexity is another reason to think that adaptive change must be glacially slow, as Darwin stressed many times, but also that selection is much less force-like, as a rule.  After the fact, seeing what managed to survive, it looks compatible with force-like, straight-line selection.

Here, the process seems to rest heavily on chance.  But as we discussed in a post in 2014 in a series on the modes and nature of natural selection, we likened the course that species take through time to the geodesic paths that objects take through spacetime, that is determined (and there it really does seem to be 'determined') by the splattered matter and energy in any point it passes through.

An overall view
This leaves us in something of a quandary.  We can easily construct criteria for making some inferences, in the stronger cases, and testing them in some experimental settings.  We can proffer imaginative scenarios to account for the presence of organized traits and adaptations.  But evolutionary explanations are often largely or wholly speculative.  This applies comparably to natural selection and to genetic drift as well, and these are not new discoveries although they seem to be in few peoples' interest to acknowledge them fully.

Darwin wanted to show by plausibility argument that life on earth was the result of natural processes, not ad hoc divine creation events.  He had scant concepts of chance or genetic drift, because his ideas of the mechanism of inheritance were totally wrong.  Concepts of probabilism and statistical testing and the like were still rather new and only in restricted use.  Darwin would have no trouble acknowledging a role for drift.  How he would respond to the elusiveness of these factors, and that they really are not 'forces', is hard to say--but he probably would vigorously try to defend systematic selection by arguing that what is must have gotten here by selection as a force. 

The causal explanation of life's diversity still falls far short of the kind of mathematical or deterministic rigor of the core physical sciences, and even of more historical physical sciences like geology, oceanography, and meteorology.  Until someone finds better ways (if they indeed are there to be found), much of evolutionary biology verges on metaphysical philosophy for reasons we've tried to argue in this series.  We should be honest about that fact, and clearly acknowledge it.

One can say that small values are at least real values, or that you can ignore small values, as in genetic drift.  Likewise one can say that small selective effects will vary from sample to sample because of chance and so on.  But such acknowledgments undermine the kinds of smooth inferences we naturally hunger for.  The assumption that what we see today is what was the case in the past is usually little more than an assumption. This is a main issue we should confront in trying to understand evolution--and it applies as well to the promises being made of 'precision' prediction of genomic causation in health and medicine.  The moving tide of innumerable genotypic ways to get similar traits, at any time, within or between populations, and over evolutionary time, needs to be taken seriously. 

It may be sufficient and correct to say, almost tautologically, that today's function evolved somehow, and we can certainly infer that it got here by some mix of evolutionary factors.  Our ancestors and their traits clearly were evolutionarily viable or we wouldn't be here.  So even if we can't really trace the history in specifics, we can usually be happy to say that, clearly, whales evolved to be able to live in the ocean.  Nobody can question that.  But the points I've tried to make in this series are serious ones worth thinking seriously about, if we really want to understand evolution, and the genetic causal mechanisms that it has produced.

Darwin the Newtonian. Part II. Is life really 'Newtonian'?

In yesterday's post I suggested that Darwin had a Newtonian view of the world, that is, he repeatedly and clearly described the organisms and diversity of life as the product of evolution, due to natural selection viewed as a force, which in an implicit way he likened to gravity.  At the same time, he knew that there was widespread evidence of various kinds for long-term evolutionary stasis, which a prominent geologist has recently called  "Darwin's null hypothesis of evolution," the idea that evolution does not occur if the environment stays the same.

That suggests that a changing environment leads to a changing mix of organisms that live in the environment, including of their genotypes.  It makes evolutionary sense, of course, because environments screen organisms for 'fitness'.  However, its negative--no change in the environment implies no evolution-- doesn't make sense and badly misrepresents what is widely assumed that we know about evolution. Even if we define evolution, as often done in textbooks, as 'change in gene frequencies' such change clearly occurs even in stable environments.  Mutations always arise, and selectively neutral variants, that is, that don't affect the fitness of their bearers, change in frequency by chance alone, not by natural selection, which means that at the genomic level evolution still occurs. It's curious that not only can organisms stay very similar in what seem like static environments, but also can be similar even in changing environments.

The idea of dual environmental-genetic stasis is an inference made from species that seem to stay similar for long time periods in environments that also appear similar--but how similar are they really?

Indeed, there are several problems with the widely if often implicitly assumed 'null hypothesis':

  1.  It is a very narrow assumption of the meaning of 'evolution', implicitly implying that it refers only to functionally important traits or their underlying genotypes. As we will see, there are ways for genetic change (and even trait change) to occur even in static environments, so that an unchanging environment doesn't imply no biological change.
  2.  It implies that 'the environment' actually stays the same, although 'environment' is hard to define.
  3.  It implies a tight essentially one-to-one fit between genotype and adaptive traits, so that in unchanging environments there will not be any functional genomic change.

All of these assumptions are wrong.  In essence, there cannot be 'the', or even 'a' null hypothesis for evolution.   Sexual reproduction, horizontal transfer, and recombination occur even without new sequence mutation.  To ignore that along with assuming a stationary environment, and adopt a null hypothesis that had anything like mathematical or Aristotelian rigor would be to reduce evolution's basis to something like this not-very-profound tautology:  Everything stays the same, if everything stays the same.

So let's look at this a little more closely
From the fossil record, we infer that some species stay the 'same' for eons, sometimes millions of years.  Then they change.  Gould and Eldridge called this 'punctuated equilibrium' and it was taken as a kind of up-dated version of Darwinism--mistakenly, because Darwin recognized it very clearly at least by the 6th edition of his Origin.  And while some aspects of animals and plants can hardly change in appearance for long time periods, close inspection shows that only some aspects of what can be preserved in fossils stays similar; other aspects typically change.  Also, speciation events occur and some descendants of an early form do change in form, even if the older species seems not to change. So we should be very careful even to suggest that environments or species really are not changing.

But mutations certainly occur and that means that even for a set of fossils that look the same, the genomes of the individuals would have varied, at least in non-functional sequence elements.  That itself is 'evolution', and it is misleading to restrict the term only to visible functional change.  But genetic drift is just the tip of the molecular evolution iceberg.  It is now very clear that there are many ways for an organism to produce what appears to be the same trait--and this is true both at the molecular and morphological levels.  That is, even a trait that 'looks' the same can be produced by different genotypes.  I wrote about this long ago in a rather simple vein, calling it phenogenetic drift, and Andreas Wagner in particular has written extensively about it, with sophisticated technical detail, in his book The Origin of Evolutionary Innovation, and this paper.  (The images are of my general paper and Wagner's book given just to break up the monotony of long text! ; he has written a more popular-level book as well called Arrival of the Fittest, which is a very good introduction to these ideas).

Recent exploration, with great detail



A modest statement of principl


Wagner explores this in many ways and among his views is that the ability of organisms to evolve innovative traits is based on the huge number of overlapping, essentially similar ways it can carry out its various functions, which allows mutations to add new function without jeopardizing the current one. Redundancy is protective against environmental changes as well as enabling new traits to arise.

This is in a sense no news at all. It was implicit in the very foundational concept of 'polygenic' control-- the determination of a trait by independent, or semi-independent of many different genes.  The way complex traits are thus constructed was clear to various biologists more than a century ago, even if the specific genes could not be identified (and the nature of a 'gene' was unknown).  A fundamental implication of the idea for our current purposes is that each individual with a given trait value (say, two people with the same height or blood pressure) can have its own underlying multi-locus genotype, which can vary among them.  Genotypes may predict phenotypes, but a phenotype does not accurately predict the underlying genotype (a deep lesson that many who promote simplistic models of causation in biomedical contexts should have learned in school).

And of course that does not even consider environmental effects, even though we know very well that for most characters of interest, normal or pathological, 'genetic' factors account only for a modest fraction of their variation. And, of course, if it's hard to identify contributing genetic variants, it's at least as difficult to identify the complex environmental contributors who make inference of phenotype from genotype so problematic. That is, neither does genotype reliably predict phenotype, nor does phenotype reliably predict genotype and the idea that they do so with 'precision' (to use todays' fashionable branding phrase) is very misleading.

In turn, these considerations imply that even if we accepted the idea of natural selection as a Newtonian deterministic force, it works at the level of the achieved trait, and can ignore (actually, is blinded to) the underlying causal genetic mechanism.  There can be extensive variation within populations in the latter, and change over time.  Just because two individuals now or in the past have a similar trait does not imply they have the same underlying genotype and hence does not imply there's been no 'evolution' even in that stable trait!

In this sense, evolution could be Newtonian, driven by force-like selection, and still not be genetically static.  But there's more.  How can there actually be stasis in a local environment?  If organisms adapt to conditions, then that in itself changes those conditions.  Even within a species, as more and more of its members take on some adaptive response to the environment, they change their own relative fitness by changing the mix of genotypes in their population, and that in turn will affect their predators and prey, their mate selection, and the various ways that the mix of resources are used in the local ecology.  If, say, the members of a species become bigger, or faster, or better at smelling prey, then the distribution of energy and species size must also change.  That is, the 'environment' cannot really remain the same.  That ecosystems are fundamentally dynamic has long been a core aspect of population ecology.

In a nutshell, it must be true that if genotypes change, that changes the local environment because my genotype is part of everybody else's 'environment'. In that sense, only if no mutations are possible can there be no 'evolution'. Even if one wants to argue that all mutations that arise are purged in order to keep the species the 'same', there will still be a dynamic mix of mutational variants over time and place.

One could even assert that an essence of Darwinism, literally interpreted, is that environments cannot be the same because the adaptation of one species affects others, even were new mutations not arising, because it affects the fitness of others. That is what his idea of the relentless struggle for existence among species meant, so stasis did cause him a bit of a problem, which he recognized in the later edition of the Origin.

I think that in essence Darwin viewed natural selection as being basically a deterministic force, like gravity, corresponding to Newton's second law of motion. And the idea of stasis corresponds to Newton's first law, of inertia. Today even many knowledgeable biologists seem to think in that way (for example, invoking drift only as a minor source of 'noise' in otherwise force-like adaptive evolution). Selective explanations are offered routinely as true, and the word 'force' routinely is used to explain how traits got here.
But there are deep problems even if we accept this view as correct.  Among other things, even if natural selection is really force-like, or if genetic drift exists as a moderating factor, then these factors should have some properties that we could test, at least in principle.  But as we'll see next time, it's not at all clear that that is the case.

Darwin the Newtonian. Part I. The Darwinian worldview

History shows that, even in science, things that everyone has long taken for granted may not be true.  Thinking in ways more carefully constructed to be restrained by what we actually know is often difficult, and the temptation is to believe what we want to believe. There are many normal, human, not to mention professional reasons for this.  But it's not good for science.  What may appear to be clear-cut 'objective' concepts about the material world can verge on the abstract or even philosophical, based on subjective opinion more than fact.  As we've discussed before, in a sense this is due to our need in evolutionary biology to rely on statistical tests based on internal comparisons, rather than to use statistical methods to test hypothesized, externally derived laws of nature (see this series and earlier--search on 'statistics' or 'p-value').

In 1859, Charles Darwin's Origin of Species culminated what considerable contemporary rumination had been suggesting, with his assertion that life today is the result of a material, historical process, by which current organisms have arisen by divergence from a common ancestry.  His synthesizing insight transformed biology in many ways.  Before that biology had largely been a descriptive science.  Before Darwin, with a few very speculative exceptions, the best causal explanations for the diversity and adaptations of organisms had been that God created them on an ad hoc basis.  Darwin saw otherwise, but his thinking was embedded in his era's general views about science.

Thanks to developments in the European Enlightenment period, by Darwin's time causation in nature was being viewed, by scientific thinkers at least, as based upon natural laws.  The Newtonian view of the cosmos was the prevalent one and, in keeping with this, Darwin adopted an implicitly quantitative, law-like view of biology.  As far as I know, Darwin was not a diligent student except in relation to areas like geology and botany, and he certainly was not mathematical (he himself said so).  However, he must have known at least something about Isaac Newton (a rather famous Cambridge predecessor).

Isaac Newton; 1689 by Godfrey KnellerWikipedia

Still, whatever he formally knew of Newton's laws of motion Darwin essentially accepted some of Newton's basic laws of motion, which we can state as follows:
1.  An object at rest remains at rest (law of inertia)
2.  Objects move or change motion only when force-like acceleration is applied, (and the greater the mass of the object the greater the force needed to change its motion)
3. Every action involves an equal and opposite reaction (when pushed, an object pushes back)

There are, I think, important analogs in Darwin's thinking, and there is still today widespread uncritical application of Newtonian-like thinking to Darwin's ideas.  The other day, I heard a deservedly famous and prominent geologist say that Darwin's 'Null hypothesis of evolution' was that unless the environment changes, no evolution will occur. This is analogous to the law of inertia, and I think it's actually fundamentally quite wrong, but we will see why it seems tempting and plausible.

The classical idea, still asserted without much if any questioning, is that organisms are fitted to their environment.  Analogous to the Newtonian law of inertia, if the environment doesn't change, neither will the organisms.  Darwin was, to my knowledge, not wholly explicit about this, but it was at the very least implicit in his view as expressed in The Origin of Species.  At least, by the 6th edition he recognized that there can be long time periods when organisms seemed not to change.

However, and this is analogous to Newton's second law, if the environment changes, then in a force-like way it screens the varying genomes of organisms, favoring those that are suited to the new conditions.  The force Darwin called natural selection.  I'm mixing bits of new and Darwin-time terminology here, but the gist of Darwin's view is that natural selection is a deterministic force, which he likened to the force of gravity in his law-like, deterministic worldview in regarding to 'motion' (change) in organisms.  Indeed, he many times asserted that the smallest difference among organisms would be detected and screened by selection.

After this has gone on for a while, the selective 'acceleration' ceases because the organisms are now adapted to their surroundings.  At that stage, the law of inertia takes over. His theory of inheritance was fundamentally wrong, but the Darwinian idea expressed in modern genetic terms is that the organisms in a population at any time and place vary genetically, and when the environment changes, those whose genotypes are best suited to the new environment will reproduce more prolifically, and will increase in frequency, driving inferior genotypes out of the population.

The Darwinian analogue to Newton's third law of motion is that changes in the nature of one organism in a local area improves its use of, and thereby alters, its local ecology.  The faster foxes catch the rabbits and proliferate. But this in turn makes the rabbits hoppier.  This then sets up a new force--in the local organisms--that Darwin referred to as the relentless 'struggle for existence.'

There are some issues in this view that are not well enough appreciated.  Darwin's endless struggle for existence suggests a continuing maelstrom of change, and yet it has been noticed that some species, based, for example, on ancient fossils.  Likewise, widely dispersed species that seemed similar across their areas of habitation implied that they had long had been static--because it takes a long time to spread over vast geographic areas.   In the case of some dinosaurs, a hundred or more million years, and based on some bacterial fossils, several billion.

Stromatolite (bacterial fossil); Western Australia, By Didier Descouens 


The idea this suggests is one of evolutionary stasis. This was recognized by Darwin, at least by the 6th edition of the Origin, and he mused over how periods of stasis would lead eventually to evolutionary change.   This idea, often now called 'punctuated equilibrium,' was claimed by Gould
in his final tome to be his own life's main discovery and contribution.  Perhaps he had not read Darwin closely enough?

An important point here is to recognize what Darwin was trying to account for.  Either selection is a relentless force-like aspect of nature, or there can be a static period when no force is being applied. How can both be true?

One answer is that there is no way for genotypes to be static, because mutations always arise.  Even if some are purged by selection's force, many will be selectively neutral and genomic evolution will always be occurring.  However, what we can see in fossils is only some aspects of morphology.  This means that while genomes are evolving, at least neutral parts, some aspects of traits persist, for adaptive or whatever other reason.

The idea of an evolutionary 'Null hypothesis' is hence elusive.  In one sense, some trait may not change unless the selective environment changes.  In another sense, selection can maintain functionally adaptive traits, while other traits and neutral DNA sequences change.  The traits may not 'evolve', but the sequence does.

Such ideas go against even Darwin's idea of life as an endless universal struggle, and perhaps why he had to do some rationalizing to account for apparent stasis.

Even this account for stasis of a single species would seem incompatible with the view of a relentless struggle among species that drives all of them in the endless rat-race of adaptation.  In that reality every part of an ecosystem affects every other part, so how can there be stasis?

We will think about some of these issues in the next three posts.  First, we'll ask whether life really can be viewed as 'Newtonian,' as Darwin did.  Then, we'll ask whether natural selection and genetic drift actually exist as they are universally characterized to be.  We'll see that our theories and our methods of inference, leave major issues open even about these fundamental aspects of the theory of life.

They were all my future specimens. And they died.

Without skeletal collections we'd struggle to do much evolutionary biology, especially when it comes to studying fossils.

We'd hate to let all those specimens go to waste, just languishing there in museum drawers. Sciencing them brings honor to their death. (Thanks for the new verb, Andy Weir.) But while we're learning from skeletons we can never forget that they're dead.

So although many of our samples are animals that were hunted by President Theodore Roosevelt (thanks Smithsonian!) or Major Powell-Cotton (thanks Powell-Cotton museum!), many of them, especially when it comes to human skeletons, are ones that died of "natural" causes.

You're thinking, well, duh. Well, yeah. Duh. But sometimes what's obvious still isn't so obviously important until someone goes to the trouble to very carefully consider it.

If the "osteological paradox" has already come to mind, that's probably because you're familiar with the classic paper "The Osteological Paradox" co-authored by a certain Mermaid and other former graduate school professors of mine.  Although the paper discusses issues that are more complicated and more specific than we need to hash out here, "osteological paradox" is a great term for the conundrum that scientists face when reconstructing things like health, fitness, and adaptation in past populations from the remains of the individuals who died.

Naturally, if you've been raised on "osteological paradox" thinking, it's one of the first things that comes to mind when you see a visually stunning study by my colleagues that analyzes pelvic morphology of dead individuals to reveal differing adaptive morphologies in the pelves of males vs. females.

Sexual dimorphism in the human pelvis has been known for quite some time, and it's already well-understood that the differences are largely located in the dimensions of a woman's birth canal. But this new study shows that differences are observable from birth and that women at post-reproductive ages do not retain the obstetrically-beneficial dimensions that younger women do during their fertile years. One of the arguments this new paper makes is that human female pelves are adapted to be most accommodating for childbirth during the child-bearing years. And that very well may be the case. However, these claims for adaptation, like most based on human skeletal samples, were based on women who were dead and, thus, not adapted.

In this context, the concluding paragraph of "The Osteological Paradox" is worth quoting:

"...choosing among competing interpretations of the osteological evidence requires tight control over cultural context as well as a deeper understanding of the biology of frailty and death. These problems deserve far more attention than they have received to date if we are to make sense of the biomedical consequences of the major social and environmental changes that have occurred during the course of cultural evolution."

And that could be extended to "biological evolution" as well. Maybe it has been in a later paper.

Anyway, when we're looking at dead humans with an evolutionary mindset, it's probably good to ask whether we can know if selective pressures were the same across the timespan covered by the sample. It's also probably good to ask whether environmental conditions were the same across the timespan covered by the sample. It's also probably good to sing this to ourselves as we design our evolutionary study of the human skeleton:



If mutations can go viral, adaptationism is less annoying.

Feb. 9, 2016: I have edited the paragraph beginning with "Exciting..." to remove details of mutation rates because my initial posting was probably wrong about coding vs. non-coding mutation rates. To fix that requires much more nuance than is relevant for the point I'm making in that paragraph, not to mention much more nuance than I'm capable of grasping immediately! Cheers and thanks to Daniel and Ken in comments below and to everyone who chimed in on Twitter. 
***
I always account for virally-induced mutation when I imagine the evolution of our genome. That's because I'll never forget this quote. Who could?
“Our genome is littered with the rotting carcasses of these little viruses that have made their home in our genome for millions of years.” - David Haussler in 2008 
Or this...
"Retroviruses are the only group of viruses known to have left a fossil record, in the form of endogenous proviruses, and approximately 8% of the human genome is made up of these elements." (source and see this)
Exciting virus discoveries aside, we're constantly mutating with each new addition to the human lineage. Thanks to whole genome sequencing, the rate of new mutation between human parent and offspring is becoming better known than ever before. We each have new single nucleotide mutations in the stretches of our DNA that are known to be functional (very little of the entire genome) and that are not (the majority of the genome). These are variants not present in our parents’ codes (for example, we might have a ‘T’ where there is a ‘A’ in our mother’s code). And there are also deletions and duplications of strings of letters in the code, sometimes very long ones. Estimates vary on parent-offspring mutation rate and that's because there are different sorts of mutations and individuals vary, even as they age, as to how many mutations they pass along, for example. Still, without any hard numbers (which I've left out purposefully to avoid the mutation rate debate), knowing that there is constant mutation is helpful for imagining how evolution works. And it also helps us understand how mutations even in coding regions aren't necessarily good nor bad. Most mutations in our genome are just riding along in our mutation-tolerant codeswhere they will begin and where they will go no one knows!

And it's with that appreciation for constant, unpredictable, but tolerated mutationof evolution's momentum, of a lineage's perpetual change, selection or noton top of a general understanding of population genetics that just makes adaptation seem astounding. It makes it difficult to believe that adaptation is as common as the myriad adaptive hypotheses for myriad traits suggest.

That's because this new raw material for adaptation, this perpetual mutation, really is only a tiny fragment of everything that can be passed on. But, what's more, each of those itty bitty changes could be stopped in its tracks before going anywhere.

The good, the bad, and the neutral, they all need luck to pass them onto the next generation. That's right. Even the good mutations have it rough. Even the winners can be losers! Here are the ways a mutation can live or die in you or me:

The Brief or Wondrous Life of Mutations, Wow.

This view of mutation fits into that slow and stately process that Darwin described, despite his imagination chugging away before he had much understanding of genetics.

Of course, bottlenecks or being part small populations would certainly help our rogue underdogs proliferate, and swiftlier so, in future generations.

Still, trying to imagine how any of my mutations, including any that might be adaptive, could become fixed in a population is enough to make me throw Origin of Species across the room.

By "adaptive," I'm talking about "better" or "advantageous" traits and their inherited basis ... that ever-popular take on the classic Darwinian idea of natural selection and competition.

For many with a view of mutation like I spelled out above, it's much easier to conceptualize adaptation as the result of negative selection, stabilizing selection, and tolerant or weak selection than it is to accept stories of full-blown positive selection, which is what "Darwinian" usually describes (whether or not that was Darwin's intention). One little error in one dude's DNA plus deep time goes all the way to fixed in the entire species because those who were lucky enough to inherit the error passed it on more frequently, because they had that error, than anyone passed on the old version of that code? I guess what I'm saying is, it's not entirely satisfying.

But what if a mutation could be less pitiful, less lonely, less vulnerable to immediate extinction? Instead, what if a mutation could arise in many people simultaneously? What if a mutation didn't have to start out as 1/10,000? What if it began as 1,000/10,000?

That would certainly up its chances of increasing in frequency over time, and quickly, relative to the rogue underdog way that I hashed out in the figure above. And that means that if there was a mutation that did increase survival and reproduction relative to the status quo, it would have a better chance to actually take over as an adaptation. This would be aided, especially, if there was non-random mating, like assortative mating, creating a population rife with this beneficial mutation in the geologic blink of an eye.

But how could such a widespread mutation arise? This sounds so heartless to put it like this, but thanks to the Zika virus, it seems to me that viruses could do the trick.

Electron micrograph of Zika virus. (wikipedia)
I'd been trapped in thinking that viruses cause unique mutations in our genomes the way that copy errors do. But why should they? If they infect me and you, they could leave the same signatures in our genomes. And the number of infected/mutated could increase if the virus is transmitted via multiple species (e.g. mosquito and human, like Zika). If scientists figure out that the rampant microcephaly associated with the Zika virus is congenital, wouldn't this be an example* of the kind of large-scale mutation that I'm talking about? 

*albeit a horrifying one, and unlikely to get passed on because of its effects, so it's not adaptive whatsoever.

If viral mutations get into our gametes or into the stem cells of our developing embryos, then we've got germ-line mutation and we could have the same germ-line mutation in the many many genomes of those infected with the virus. As long as we survive the virus, and we reproduce, then we'll have these mutant babies who don't just have their own unique mutations, but they also have these new but shared mutations and the shared new phenotypes associated with them, simultaneously.

Why not? Well, not if there are no viruses that ever work like this.

We need some examples. The mammalian placenta, and its subsequent diversity, is said to have begun virally, but I can't find any writing that assumes anything other than a little snowflake mutation-that-could.

Anything else? Any traits that "make us human"? Any traits that are pegged as convergences but could be due to the mutual hosting of the same virus exacting the same kind of mutation with the same phenotypic result in separate lineages?

I've always had a soft spot for underdogs. And I've always given the one-off mutation concept the benefit of the doubt because I know that my imagination struggles to appreciate deep time. What choice do you have when you think evolutionarily? However, just the possibility that viruses can mutate us at this larger scale, even though I know of no examples, is already bringing me a little bit of hope and peace, and also some much needed patience for adaptationism.

***
Update: I just saw this published today, asking whether microcephaly and other virus-induced birth defects are congenital. Answer = no one knows yet: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/science/zika-virus-microcephaly-birth-defects-rubella-cytomegalovirus.html?partner=IFTTT&_r=1

Why is the human vagina so big?

We are obsessed with penis and testicle size. Yet, we can barely say "vagina" and when we do we're usually talking about the vulva.

Everyone's come across some article somewhere on-line that is thrilled to share how big human penises really are, for primates, and to explain why they evolved to be so big. It's not really the length, but the girth. Alan Dixson is your go-to on this. He's conservative in his assessment of the literature on penis size and even he concedes that human penis "circumference is unusual when compared to the penes of other hominoids (apes)" (p. 65 in Sexual Selection and the Origins of Human Mating Systems).

A favorite explanation for the big phallus is female mate choice, that females selectively make babies with males who have larger and, presumably, more pleasurable semen delivery devices. This is backed up by studies. When life size projections of naked men are shown to female subjects, they say they find the ones with bigger ones to be more attractive. [This is exactly how mate choice works where I live, how about you?]

Other explanations include male competition. If you can deliver your package to the front yard but the other guy can deliver to the front door, his is more likely to be carried inside the house first. Or, if he can steal away what you just delivered, then, again, his package has yours beat. Thanks to his big penis he's more likely to pass on his winning penis genes than you are to pass on your loser penis genes. Loser.

All this is just terribly fun to write about and I'm not even going nuts (gah) like they do. And they do. They really do. And all over the Internet they do: "Evolution of human penis" gets 53,000 hits just on scholar.google alone, and about 832,000 on Google.

But doesn't it make sense that for a penis to be somewhat useful it has to be somewhat correlated to vagina size?

I'm talking about all penises in the universe and all vaginas too. Sure there's variation, but a penis can't be too wide. It helps to be long, probably, but it can't be too long.

So neither pleasure nor psychology need matter at all, just function associated with some sort of fit. Pleasure and psychology are never invoked to explain penis morphology in other animals. If anything, it's the cornucopia of horrifying, not pleasing, animal penises that begs for evolutionary explanations.

Wouldn't you explain the size and shape of the key by the size and shape of the lock? So wouldn't it be a little more scientifically sound to hypothesize that the human penis is sized and shaped like that because it fits well into the human vagina?

Sure, it gets chicken-and-eggy or turtles-all-the-way-downy, but c'mon. Isn't it a bit obvious that the privates that fit inside the other privates are probably correlated? You'd think that even the people who have never had intercourse would default to this explanation for the evolution of the human penis.

Figure 2.  Examples of genital covariation in waterfowl.
Figure 2. Examples of genital covariation in waterfowl.
(A) Harlequin duck (Histrionicus histrionicus) and (B) African goose (Anser cygnoides), two species with a short phallus and no forced copulations, in which females have simple vaginas as in Fig 1a. (C) Long-tailed duck (Clangula hyemalis), and (D) MallardAnas platyrhynchos two species with a long phallus and high levels of forced copulations, in which females have very elaborate vaginas (size bars = 2 cm). ] = Phallus, * = Testis, ★ = Muscular base of the male phallus, ▹ = upper and lower limits of the vagina.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000418.g002

But we're rarely, if ever, told that human penises are relatively girthy because human vaginas are. It's always about male competition or female preference.

Sure, we may be a little weird compared to our close relatives for not having a baculum (penis bone), and maybe that's the sort of thing you want to explain for whatever reason, but does human penis size and shape need a uniquely human story?

Assuming it's correlated to the vagina like it probably is in many other species,* then no it doesn't... unless the size and shape of the human vagina has an exceptional story.

Does it? We wouldn't know. There are zero (look!) articles titled "Why is the human vagina so big?"

Until right now.

Here we go. If we were going to answer it the same way we've long explained the human penis, and other animal penis shapes, then we've got a few ideas...

Because walking upright made the vagina conspicuous and males thought a bigger vagina was better. Because big vaginas outcompete small ones at catching sperm. Because of male pleasure from coitus with a big vagina. Because of heat dissipation or thermoregulation. Because of a tradeoff with brain size.

And of course, we'd need to demonstrate that the human vagina is in fact larger, relative to body size, than the vaginas of other primates. Regardless, a sound answer to the question of vagina size and shape focuses on childbirth, wouldn't you say? She's got to be big enough to push out a baby and, for humans, it's a great big baby. 



So if there's an exceptionally human story for the great big human penis, that exceptional story originates not in a woman's orgasms, not in her pornographic thoughts or her lustful eyes, but in her decidedly unsexy "birth canal."

And I dug up a nice little note to explain this to us all written by Dr. Bowman, a gynecologist, back in 2008 for the Archives of Sexual Behavior


That note is magnificent. It starts out giving the only vagina-size-based, not to mention childbirth-based, explanation for human penises that I can find in the literature (which is thankfully cited by Dixson in his book mentioned above). But it still manages to bring the explanation beyond the vagina and onto another proud triumph: "In sum, man’s larger penis is a consequence of his larger brain."

After you clean up the coffee you just spat onto your computer screen, you can read it all for yourself up there in the figure.

Guess who didn't read it? That study in PNAS, mentioned above, that showed women naked penises, got a high attractive score for the big ones, and thinks that's evidence for mate choice now, today, let alone back when (I'm going to speculate that) women had a tiny bit less of it.

Point is, the literature rages on with the special explanations for the big penis with nary a big vagina in sight.

But you heard it here, at least.

Childbirth is why the human vagina is so big and, consequently, why the male penis is so big. It's pretty straightforward. Yet we're still left scratching our heads as to why the penis question endures.

Is evolutionary science averse to big vaginas?

Does nobody love a big vagina?

Because that's just ridiculous. Everybody came from one.



*Unfortunately a few scholar.google searches led me to find no cross-species comparisons of mammalian vagina lengths or any vaginal measures. It may be out there, but I haven' t found it. I found some measures for bitches... DOGS! And some heifers... COWS! So I've got to compile some data if I'm to do this properly. Baby size might be a way to do this.

**UPDATE. p. 73 in Dixson has Figure 4.3 with nine primate species' penile and vaginal lengths plotted. Thanks Patrick C for reminding me where I'd seen something like this and where to point readers!

Rare Disease Day and the promises of personalized medicine

O ur daughter Ellen wrote the post that I republish below 3 years ago, and we've reposted it in commemoration of Rare Disease Day, Febru...