Our Darwin's Tubercle (or Point) opus 23
| 30 November 2021 1200 Hours | | Evolution, Anatomy, Behavior |
A tiny bump at 10 o'clock on the right ear.
(This bump is at 2 o'clock on the left ear!)
But, to the point--why this small projection?
Ahh, another genetic take from the eons of life's change.
Where did we come from?
From what did we evolve?
Hmm. Some creature with pointed ears;
All that remains in our present morphology
To remind us of a very different origin!
Yes? An insectivorous, arboreal tree shrew!
Go to a source of historical knowledge and check it out.
And be overjoyed and humbled from whence we might have come.
(Note: This is what Darwin proclaimed in his The Descent of Man--1879--
to show how we might be related to other primates, many of which
do not have pointed ears! An unproven hypothesis, yet not completed.
But a nice story which I could not resist. A single gene with two
alleles, one of which is dominant. My poetic side thinks
It might still lead to something.)