How Electric Fish Were Able to Evolve Electric Organs
news.utexas.edu
news.utexas.edu
The different ways of saying it communicate different premises. The fish have no agency in their own evolution. More importantly, there is no agency, it's just so ething that happens.
Actually, I think the next interesting step would be to look for a similar gene mutation in those humans who have claimed that street lights dim as they pass or that they are sensitive to electromagnetic radiation.
Or even more cool - we could induce this genetic change in humans so that we all produce electric energy available on demand and then design clothing that allows us to harvest and use this energy. We would all be self-contained generators and accessing this power could be made as simple as using a silicone dongle that fits over your little finger or other convenient appendage with an adapter for any device on the other end. Fingertip chargers for your phones!
Imagine if you will an electric automobile that you own that can only be started when there is a driver in the seat who has connected the vehicle's electronics to their own body, authenticating themselves to the vehicle. You could lock a vehicle to a specific person while still enabling a valet mode that provides highly limited functionality to a non-authenticatable operator.
This vehicle needs no batteries since the power is supplied by the operator and as long as the operator is still alive and connected the vehicle can be driven.
I'm no electrical engineer or geneticist and I don't play one in my driveway but this seems like a great use case for gene-editing technology. Elimination of the need for batteries could stop a lot of environmental degradation from the mining and processing of ores. If we all could be self-contained powerpacks then there would be no need for batteries.
I wonder whether this means that a user would need to consume more calories to supply all that energy. That might strain food resources globally. Hmmmm, a lot to consider here.
Y'all are smart. I'm sure you'll identify all the hurdles to conquer and come up with some cool tech in the process. I'll work on more bullshit ideas.
That works out to about 200 joules of energy released over the period. Enough to run a small LED lightbulb for about 15 minutes. But you've burned a whole day's worth of eel-calories. May be more feasible as a weight-loss technique than a way to recharge your laptop.
Maybe if we tweaked the gene expression so that it only affects body hairs, effectively turning each hair into a wind-powered generator. The individual contributions might be small but cumulatively may be more significant.
It would be one way to kill the whole barber, hair stylist, and Brazilian wax businesses and taking it further, it would also potentially affect all clothing manufacturers globally by encouraging full nudity which might remove body-shaming issues by promoting health and fitness and better diet choices.
Tattoos become a simple way to set yourself apart and advertisers buy skin billboard space so individuals can monetize their derrieres.
Gillette, Schick, Dollar Shave Club all fade into obscurity or get marginalized as tools only useful for pre-surgery shaves.
Maybe I need to step away from the computer and move on with life. Thanks for reading.
It's well established nowadays that a gene duplication occurred in the ancestor of all bony fish. That's sometimes a problem for people doing gene knock-out experiments on zebra fish, where you sometimes knock out not only the target but also the homolog because the two are still too similar, despite 425 Myr of evolution.
Land vertebrates do not have this duplication because they are descended from an ancestor of the coelacanth.
What happened with these fish is that they repurposed the backup. They had two Na channel genes, one in muscles, and one spare.
For a long time I believed that if two organisms were phenotypically similar, they must have a nearby common ancestor. But I keep reading more and more about how nature seems to stumble across the same adaptations and mechanisms via many different routes. E.g. what we know as a "tree" is not a distinct phylogenetic branch, but a form that has evolved independently over and over again [1]
[1] https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
It feels like we're just beginning to discover the extent to which non-human communication blankets the earth. Sounds, colors, chemicals, sub/supersonic vibration, all seem to mediate communication between various species, including plants and fungi.