Zebra Crossing ~ Maythil Radhakrishnan

Evolutionary biologist Jeff Clune said, "If the shoe fits, don't change a thing."
This is related to what he and his research team call "developmental disruption force."
Many animals are busy building tissues and other structures, even after millions of years of evolution. They appear to serve no purpose and duly disappear somewhere along the line. Isn't it like building a rollercoaster first, demololishing it and constructing a skyscraper on the same ground? An engineer would definitely skip the roller coaster step, but "evolution is more of a tinkerer and less of an engineer". In nature's seemingly wierd schema, the roller coaster is created and torn down because parts from that teardown are required to build the skyscraper. In a growing embryo, every new structure is fitted in a delicate ambit consisting of everything that has already developed; newly evolved traits tend to get added at the end of development, as there is less risk of disrupting anything important. "Mutations that alter that environment, such as by eliminating a structure, can thus disrupt later stages of development. Even if a structure is not actually used, it may set the stage for other functional tissues to grow properly." Clune's realisation came from a set of self-replicating computer programs called "Avidians" that mimic critical stages in natural selection in real-life organisms