Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us About Development and Evolution

Worth reading and contemplating seriously.

As in his previous book, Basic Instinct (also highly recommended), Blumberg does a remarkable job of translating a number of complex ideas into readily understandable prose. The relationship between development and evolution was a subject largely neglected in mainstream biology for much of the 20th century. The tide has begun to turn significantly only over the course of the last two decades--not enough time for the burgeoning science of epigenetics (molecular and molar) to have filtered into the general scientific and popular consciousness. Books like Blumberg's are thus badly needed.


In Freaks of Nature Blumberg presents a novel way of understanding the development and significance of "freaks"--those organisms who differ from the species-typical (or order-, family-, or genus-typical) norm in significant if not radical ways. Whether the freak be a cyclopean human fetus, a bipedal goat or rodent, an experimentally produced "unicorn," or a female hyena with freakishly enlarged sexual anatomy, Blumberg shows that there is a developmental logic to such anomalies. As numerous findings from modern epigenetics and developmental biology show, subtle differences in the timing of events during development (e.g., the separation of the tissues that eventually become the two fully formed eyes), many of them open or responsive to environmental perturbation, can result in a cascade of downstream effects, producing sometimes radically novel forms.


Many such novelties are simply not viable and thus never make it to the stage where scientists can study and others wonder at them. Other anomalies, like Johnny Eck, a man born with no legs who nonetheless managed to locomote with a high degree of fluidity and even gracefulness--using his hands--are not only viable but capable of thriving due to the high degree of plasticity inherent in the brain and nervous system. We are neither born with a knowledge of what our bodies will be like (for one, our bodies change throughout the lifespan, so we would have to be born with knowledge of infinitely many bodies) nor a knowledge of how to effectively and efficiently control them. This is the beauty of development and is why developmental processes have enormous implications for understanding not only ourselves as humans (we are, in important ways, freaks among the primates), but ourselves as individuals and moreover evolution as a whole.


Blumberg concludes his excellent book by introducing the possibility of two new fields of scientific investigation: terethology, or the study of the behavior of developmental anomalies (or "monsters"), and developmental neuroethology, a field that would seek to study comprehensively the behavior and neural development of "brains packaged in novel forms." In many ways such a field already exists or at least has seeds in modern developmental science (developmental neurobiology, neuroscience and psychobiology). It also reminiscent of the vision for the behavioral sciences held by the underappreciated psychologist and embryologist Zing-Yang Kuo: an integrative, interdisciplinary science that takes the experimental production and study of novel phenotypes (or neophenotypes) as central to an understanding of both developmental and evolutionary processes.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.