The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code (51 page)

tails contract involuntarily when children cough or sneeze
:
For more on human tails, see Jan Bondeson’s wonderful
A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities.
The book also has an astounding chapter on maternal impressions (like those in
chapter 1
), as well as many other gruesome tales from the history of anatomy.

simply have to round them up
:
The scientist did not end up winning funding for his research. And to be fair, he didn’t intend to spend all $7.5 million developing the gay bomb. Some of that money would have gone to, among other projects, a separate bomb that would have given the enemy epically bad breath, to the point of inducing nausea. No word on whether the scientist ever realized he could combine the two bombs into the most frustrating weapon in history.

They’re that similar
:
In fact, this is how scientists first determined that chimps, not gorillas, are our closest living relatives. Scientists performed the first DNA hybridization experiments in the 1980s by mixing chimp, gorilla, and human DNA in a hot, steamy bath. When things cooled down, human DNA stuck to chimp DNA more readily than it did to gorilla DNA. QED.

should always have fewer mutations
:
This isn’t the place to even attempt to resolve this debate, but the scientists who first proposed the interbreeding theory have of course tried to counterrefute this supposed refutation. And the original scientists do have a point: in their paper announcing the theory way back in 2006, they actually anticipated this criticism about the X looking more uniform because of sperm production rates. Specifically, they noted that while X chromosomes should indeed
look more alike for that reason, the X chromosomes they studied looked even more alike than this scenario could account for.

Naturally, the refuting scientists are busy countering the counterrefutations. It’s all very technical and a bit arcane, but exciting, given the stakes…

The
Times
story
:
In addition to its salacious details, the
Times
story also included this bizarre—and bizarrely egalitarian—quote: one scientist was convinced “that if the orang[utan] be hybridized with the yellow race, the gorilla with the black race, and the chimpanzees with the white race, all three hybrids will reproduce themselves.” What’s striking, especially for the time, is the insistence that all human beings, regardless of color, were kin to brutes.

the path to forty-six chromosomes a million years ago
:
To anticipate a question, yes, chromosomes can split, too, by a process called fission. In the primate line, our current chromosome numbers three and twenty-one were once yoked together into a team, and formed our longest chromosome for millions of years. Numbers fourteen and fifteen also split before the rise of great apes long ago, and both retain a funny, off-center shape today as a legacy. In some ways, then, the fourteen-fifteen fusion in the Chinese man was the ultimate genetic atavism, returning him to the ancestral, pre-ape state!

months of trench warfare
:
For more on Ivanov’s life, the most authoritative and least sensationalistic source is a paper by Kirill Rossiianov, in
Science in Context,
from the summer 2002 issue: “Beyond Species: Il’ya Ivanov and his experiments on cross-breeding humans with anthropoid apes.”

“Until I tasted a bluebottle [fly]”
:
The supply of Buckland anecdotes is pretty much bottomless. One of his friends’ favorites was the time he and a stranger sitting across from him on a long train ride both fell asleep in their seats. Buckland woke up to find that some red slugs formerly nestled in his pockets had escaped, and were now sliming their way across his companion’s bald pate. Buckland discreetly exited at the next stop. Buckland also inspired his equally eccentric son Frank, who inherited his predilection for zoophagy and actually pioneered some of the more outré dishes the Buckland family ate. Frank had a standing agreement with the London Zoo that he got a shank of whatever animals died there.

Despite insulting Buckland, Darwin also indulged in zoophagy, even joining the Glutton Club at Cambridge, where he and companions dined on hawks, owls, and other beasts. On the
Beagle
voyage, Darwin ate ostrich omelets and armadillo roasted in its case, and after tucking into an agouti,
a coffee-colored rodent that weighs twenty pounds, he declared it “the very best meat I ever tasted.”

For more details on Buckland’s life, work, family, and eccentricities, I highly recommend
The Heyday of Natural History,
by Lynn Barber, and
Bones and Ochre,
by Marianne Sommer.

He named it
Megalosaurus
:
It later came to light that another scientist had discovered
Megalosaurus
bones in the 1600s, including a tree trunk of a femur. But he’d classified them as the bones of giant humans, a decision that Buckland’s work disproved. Strangely, two knobs on the end of that femur apparently traced out with Michelangelo-like verisimilitude the lower half of the human male package, inspiring a less-than-dignified moniker for the purported giants. Arguably, then, based on scientific priority in naming, the first known dinosaur species should be called
Scrotum humanum.
Buckland’s more proper name stuck, though.

thick, glowering brow we still associate with Neanderthals
:
The professor who identified the purported Cossack had decided the brow was shaped that way because the victim spent so many days furrowing it in pain. The professor apparently even believed the Cossack had scampered up sixty feet of sheer rock while mortally wounded, disrobed completely, and buried himself two feet deep in clay.

which lacks the tag
:
Lately, some DNA tags (a.k.a. DNA watermarks) have gotten rather elaborate, encoding names, e-mail addresses, or famous quotations—things nature couldn’t have inserted by chance. One research team headed by Craig Venter encoded the following quotes in A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s, then wove them into a synthetic genome that they created from scratch and inserted into a bacterium:

Unfortunately Venter bungled the last quote. Feynman actually wrote, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Venter also ran into trouble with the Joyce quote. Joyce’s family (which controls his estate) is reputedly stingy about letting anyone (including a bacterium) quote him without express written permission.

millions of tons of vaporized rock per second
:
Compared to Mount Saint Helens, Toba spewed two thousand times more crap into the air. Of volcanoes worldwide, Toba is one of the few rivals to the giga-volcano currently smoldering beneath Wyoming, which will blow Yellowstone and everything around it sky-high someday.

accidental, unrelated to his genius
:
Stephen Jay Gould gives a highly entertaining rendition of the story of Cuvier’s autopsy in
The Panda’s Thumb.
Gould also wrote a masterly, two-part article about the life of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck—whom we’ll meet in
chapter 15
—in his collection
The Lying Stones of Marrakech.

the cost is a punier brain
:
Partly to determine how and why hobbits shrank, scientists are currently drilling a hobbit tooth to extract DNA. It’s a dicey procedure, since hobbits (unlike Neanderthals) lived in exactly the sort of tropical climate that degrades DNA the quickest. Attempts to extract hobbit DNA have always failed so far.

Studying hobbit DNA should help scientists determine if it really belongs in the genus
Homo
, a contentious point. Until 2010, scientists knew of only two other
Homo
species—Neanderthals, and possibly hobbits—still alive when
Homo sapiens
began overrunning the planet. But scientists recently had to add another to the list, the Denisovans (dun-EE-suh-vinz), named after a cave in cold Siberia where a five-year-old girl died tens of thousands of years ago. Her bones looked Neanderthal when scientists discovered them amid ancient layers of dirt and goat feces in 2010, but DNA extracted from a knucklebone shows enough distinctions to count as a separate line of
Homo—
the first extinct species discovered solely through genetic (not anatomical) evidence.

Traces of Denisovan DNA are found today in Melanesians, the people who originally settled the islands between New Guinea and Fiji. Apparently the Melanesians ran into Denisovans somewhere on the long haul from Africa to the South Seas and, as their ancestors had with Neanderthals, interbred with them. Today Melanesians have up to 8 percent non–
Homo sapiens
DNA. But beyond these clues, the Denisovans remain a mystery.

scattered the ashes
:
Want more? Galileo’s finger, Oliver Cromwell’s skull, and Jeremy Bentham’s entire decapitated head (including its freakishly shrunken skin) all went on posthumous display over the centuries. Thomas Hardy’s heart reportedly got eaten by a cat. Phrenologists stole Joseph Haydn’s head just before burial, and cemetery workers stole Franz Schubert’s “larvae-laden” hair while transferring him to a new grave. Someone even held a jar in front of Thomas Edison’s mouth during his
death rattle to capture his last breath. The jar immediately went on exhibit in a museum.

I could probably go on for another page listing famous body parts that found new life—Percy Bysshe Shelley’s heart, Grover Cleveland’s cancerous jaw, supposed bits of Jesus’s foreskin (the Divine Prepuce)—but let me wrap up by pointing out that there are no legs to the persistent rumor that the Smithsonian Institution owns John Dillinger’s penis.

pack the cortex with neurons
:
The overall genetic algorithm to add bulk and density to the brain might be amazingly simple. The biologist Harry Jerison has proposed the following example. Imagine a stem cell whose DNA programs it to “divide thirty-two times, then stop.” If no cells die, you’d end up with 4,294,967,296 neurons. Now imagine tweaking that code to “divide thirty-four times, then stop.” This would lead to two more doublings, or 17,179,869,184 neurons.

The difference between 4.3 billion neurons and 17.2 billion neurons, Jerison notes, would be roughly the difference between the chimpanzee cortex population and the human cortex population. “The code may seem overly simple,” Jerison says, but “instructions that are significantly more complex may be beyond the capacity of genes to encode information.”

knew Mormon theology in lobotomizing detail
:
It’s unclear if Peek, a devout Mormon, knew about the rift that genetic archaeology has recently opened within the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Mormons have traditionally believed—ever since Joseph Smith, just fourteen years old, copied down Jehovah’s very words in 1820—that both Polynesians and American Indians descended from a doughty Jewish prophet, Lehi, who sailed from Jerusalem to America in 600 BC. Every DNA test ever conducted on these peoples disagrees on this point, however: they’re not Middle Eastern in the slightest. And this contradiction not only invalidates the literalness of the Mormon holy books, it upsets the complicated Mormon eschatology about which brown peoples will be saved during end times, and which groups therefore need proselytizing to in the meantime. This finding has caused a lot of soul wringing among some Mormons, especially university scientists. For some, it crushed their faith. Most run-of-the-mill Latter-Day Saints presumably either don’t know or have absorbed the contradiction and moved on.

certainly doesn’t capture him
:
For an account that does succeed in capturing Peek’s talents, see “Inside the Mind of a Savant,” by Donald Treffert and Daniel Christensen, in the December 2005 issue of
Scientific American.

awfully awkward method of replication
:
The warped-zipper model with its alternating left and right helixes actually debuted
twice in 1976 (more simultaneous discovery). First a team in New Zealand published the idea. Shortly thereafter, a team working independently in India came forward with two warped-zipper models, one identical to the New Zealanders’ and one with some of the A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s flipped upside down. And true to the cliché of intellectual rebels everywhere, almost all the members of both teams were outsiders to molecular biology and had no preconceived notions that DNA had to be a double helix. One New Zealander wasn’t a professional scientist, and one Indian contributor had never heard of DNA!

musical biases as ruthless as any hipster’s
:
Monkeys either ignore human music or find it irritating, but recent studies with cotton-top tamarins, monkeys in South America, have confirmed that they respond strongly to music tailored for them. David Teie, a cellist based in Maryland, worked with primatologists to compose music based on the calls that tamarins use to convey fear or contentment. Specifically, Teie patterned his work on the rising and falling tones in the calls, as well as their duration, and when he played the various opuses, the cotton-tops showed visible signs of relaxation or anxiety. Showing a good sense of humor, Teie commented to a newspaper, “I may be just a schmo to you. But, man, to monkeys I am Elvis.”