Story Archives of 'Evolution'

We’ve all heard of Tom Thumb, the Elephant Man, the bearded lady and the Siamese twins. Legendary entrepreuner P.T. Barnum charged admission to catch a glimpse of them at his traveling carnivals. Audiences also flocked to theaters in 1932 for Tod Browning’s film Freaks, considered a masterpiece of the grotesque. People marvelled at the sight of an armless woman using her feet to eat with a fork, or Prince Randian using only his mouth to light a cigarette.

We’ve become a more compassionate society since then – we no longer lock people up and force them to parade around for our own amusement. Yet our fascination with nature’s flukes hasn’t diminished. Mark Blumberg says we shouldn’t look away from them – in fact, we could learn a lot about ourselves from studying these so-called freaks. Blumberg is a professor of behavioral and cognitive neuroscience and developmental science at the University of Iowa, and is editor-in-chief of the journal Behavioral Neuroscience. His book is called Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us About Development and Evolution.

The scientist Charles Stockard, who studied the development of bird embryos in the early part of last century, wrote that the “important matter of a few hours’ difference in egg-laying time lies between the successful class of birds and a hopelessly unfit monstrous condition.” So even extreme anomalies, like two-headed animals, can be produced with just subtle adjustments.

Blumberg writes that “the embryo’s potential to produce two heads is no less ancient, and no less fundamental, than its potential to produce just one.” So basically, if our species finds it useful to have babies with two heads, our bodies can begin to do that. Also, we try to “correct” what we see as abberations, like fitting a three-legged dog with a prosthetic leg, which is often times not the best soultion. These questions arise when babies born with both make and female genital organs. Often, doctors and parents will make a choice for the baby. But in the animal world, sexual ambiguity and plasticity are just an ordinary way of life.

And while we have made strides in preventing some developmental anomalies, new environmental conditions could make these anomalies more likely. Chemical dumping, climate change, and nuclear accidents like Chernobyl could lead to a world in which mutations are more widespread.

Also, we travel with producer Caitlyn Kim to New York’s Coney Island, where she found that the sideshow freaks of today have a little more say in how they're treated than the residents of Victorian-era freak shows. She produced this piece for B-Side radio. Click here to listen and click here to visit B-Side Radio.

2009 marks Charles Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species. Overlooked courtesy of all the perfectly legitimate hoopla is a significant detail in the Darwin tale. Alfred Russel Wallace, an obscure English naturalist, had glimpsed the theory in the midst of a malarial fit while collecting specimens in the Spice Islands in 1858, and serendipitously sent his manuscript off to Darwin. Had he not done so, but sent the manuscript instead directly to a journal, the history of science would be very different. This talk will tell Wallace's remarkable story and answer why we celebrate Darwin while Wallace seldom, if ever, rises above the obscurity. With an undergraduate degree in zoology from Oxford and a PhD in evolutionary genetics from Princeton, Andrew Berry is a lecturer at Harvard where he teaches evolutionary biology and history of biology. His expertise is in Drosophila genetics but his fieldwork career has compensated for all that time spent in the lab: giant rats in New Guinea, butterflies and ants in Australia, aphids in Taiwan, bats in Nepal, wrens on the Faeroe Islands, mice on the Orkney Islands, butterflies in Borneo. He has published books on Alfred Russel Wallace and, to mark the 50th the anniversary of the discovery of the double helix, on DNA , and lectures widely to academic and popular audiences.

We’ve all heard of Tom Thumb, the Elephant Man, the bearded lady and the Siamese twins. Legendary entrepreuner P.T. Barnum charged admission to catch a glimpse of them at his traveling carnivals. Audiences also flocked to theaters in 1932 for Tod Browning’s film Freaks, considered a masterpiece of the grotesque. People marvelled at the sight of an armless woman using her feet to eat with a fork, or Prince Randian using only his mouth to light a cigarette.

We’ve become a more compassionate society since then – we no longer lock people up and force them to parade around for our own amusement. Yet our fascination with nature’s flukes hasn’t diminished. Mark Blumberg says we shouldn’t look away from them – in fact, we could learn a lot about ourselves from studying these so-called freaks. Blumberg is a professor of behavioral and cognitive neuroscience and developmental science at the University of Iowa, and is editor-in-chief of the journal Behavioral Neuroscience. His new book is called Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us About Development and Evolution.

The scientist Charles Stockard, who studied the development of bird embryos in the early part of last century, wrote that the “important matter of a few hours’ difference in egg-laying time lies between the successful class of birds and a hopelessly unfit monstrous condition.” So even extreme anomalies, like two-headed animals, can be produced with just subtle adjustments.

Blumberg writes that “the embryo’s potential to produce two heads is no less ancient, and no less fundamental, than its potential to produce just one.” So basically, if our species finds it useful to have babies with two heads, our bodies can begin to do that. Also, we try to “correct” what we see as abberations, like fitting a three-legged dog with a prosthetic leg, which is often times not the best soultion. These questions arise when babies born with both make and female genital organs. Often, doctors and parents will make a choice for the baby. But in the animal world, sexual ambiguity and plasticity are just an ordinary way of life.

And while we have made strides in preventing some developmental anomalies, new environmental conditions could make these anomalies more likely. Chemical dumping, climate change, and nuclear accidents like Chernobyl could lead to a world in which mutations are more widespread.

Also, we travel with producer Caitlyn Kim to New York’s Coney Island, where she found that the sideshow freaks of today have a little more say in how they're treated than the residents of Victorian-era freak shows. She produced this piece for B-Side radio. Click here to listen and click here to visit B-Side Radio.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was in New Hampshire and spoke to the Nashua Rotary Club where he answered this question on international diplomacy.

One voter also questioned the former Arkansas Governor and ordained Baptist minister on his beliefs on creationism vs. evolution.