I don’t know whether or not you’ve noticed, but there’s a lot of anger out there. Seems that no one can do or say anything without some angry backlasher responding on social media or on pundit shows. A bit depressing, isn’t it? Apparently, many get their blood boiling enough to seek some bloodlust satisfaction.
Too bad evolution’s workings are largely untraceable. It’s difficult, as you know, to pinpoint when some gene is going to change its function, be lost to the future, or incorporate itself in a future. The best we can do is to say, “Here’s a gene that functions so.” We can link gene to organism, too. Take Komodo dragons, for example. These scary creatures have anticoagulant saliva, but they also have genes that regulate haemostasis; that means Komodos can reduce blood loss after one of their kind bites them. According to a study by Abigail L. Lind and others, the dragon’s genome contains two coagulation factors as a result of positive evolutionary selection.*
In an age when so many are out to draw blood from their intellectual opponents, we could use a little positive selection to protect us from the cuts and bloodletting on social media. Unfortunately, evolution occurs at the species, and not at the individual, level. So, incorporating into our emotions some analog of fibrin, the clotting agent, isn’t in any individual’s future. Yet, having such a coagulant nature seems to be a necessary protective adaptation should social media’s bloodthirst last not briefly, but through numerous generations.
In a society of dragons, being bitten is not just possible, but probable. History records such biting in every generation, and with the rise of the printing press and then newspapers, virtual biting proliferated. Electronic media put more dragons in contact with one another; thus, more biting. Since no emotional coagulant gene has as yet entered the human genome, the only immediate protection lies in muzzling the mouths of the dragons or in staying out of the dragons' den. Otherwise, we bite; we bleed.
*Lind, Abigail L., et al. Genome of the Komodo dragon reveals adaptations in the cardiovascular and chemosensory systems of monitor lizards. Nature Ecology & Evolution 3, 1241-1252 (2019) https://rdcu.be/bOmhS or https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-019-0945-8
Too bad evolution’s workings are largely untraceable. It’s difficult, as you know, to pinpoint when some gene is going to change its function, be lost to the future, or incorporate itself in a future. The best we can do is to say, “Here’s a gene that functions so.” We can link gene to organism, too. Take Komodo dragons, for example. These scary creatures have anticoagulant saliva, but they also have genes that regulate haemostasis; that means Komodos can reduce blood loss after one of their kind bites them. According to a study by Abigail L. Lind and others, the dragon’s genome contains two coagulation factors as a result of positive evolutionary selection.*
In an age when so many are out to draw blood from their intellectual opponents, we could use a little positive selection to protect us from the cuts and bloodletting on social media. Unfortunately, evolution occurs at the species, and not at the individual, level. So, incorporating into our emotions some analog of fibrin, the clotting agent, isn’t in any individual’s future. Yet, having such a coagulant nature seems to be a necessary protective adaptation should social media’s bloodthirst last not briefly, but through numerous generations.
In a society of dragons, being bitten is not just possible, but probable. History records such biting in every generation, and with the rise of the printing press and then newspapers, virtual biting proliferated. Electronic media put more dragons in contact with one another; thus, more biting. Since no emotional coagulant gene has as yet entered the human genome, the only immediate protection lies in muzzling the mouths of the dragons or in staying out of the dragons' den. Otherwise, we bite; we bleed.
*Lind, Abigail L., et al. Genome of the Komodo dragon reveals adaptations in the cardiovascular and chemosensory systems of monitor lizards. Nature Ecology & Evolution 3, 1241-1252 (2019) https://rdcu.be/bOmhS or https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-019-0945-8
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