 |
 |
Baby Origins
Name: Joe Booby
Status: N/A
Age: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: N/A
Question:
What is the menstrual cycle?
Replies:
Storks bring 'em. My 2nd child will be born in a few weeks, and you
wouldn't believe the trouble we've had --- storks absolutely refuse to fly
into Chicago's O'Hare airport, and I can't say I blame them....
So anyway let's talk about this more generally. Why babies? Why did
evolution produce life forms that are all the time making copies of
themselves and then dying, instead of life forms that just live
indefinitely until accident kills them off? Probably because the
environment changes all the time, glaciers, meteor strikes, Republican
leadership of Congress, etc., and you need a mechanism by which species can
adapt quickly. At the same time you need insurance, a fall-back mechanism
whereby you can cut your losses and get out of an experimental adaptation
that isn't working. So it works this way: life is essentially genetic
material, DNA molecules. These molecules build themselves a body out of
their environment, and the body carries around the molecules and with
greater or lesser ingenuity protects them from harm, including with greater
or lesser adaptability that from minor environmental changes (we learn to
come in out of the rain). But once the body is built, it's hard for it to
learn really new tricks to deal with major environmental changes, as alas
we all learn as we get older. So every few decades the molecules design
and build a new body and move into it. Every time they do this some of
them randomly change a few of the characteristics of the body. Normally the
New Improved Body isn't as good, so the molecules cut their losses and the
new model bites the dust. But when radical environmental change comes
along and the standard model falters, the New Improved Body (some versions
of it) will work and the molecules survive.
Christopher Grayce
Click here to return to the Biology Archives
| |
Update: June 2012
|
|
