Evolution of Hormone Signaling

Last week, I received some delusional e-mail from Phil Skell, who claims that modern biology has no use for evolutionary theory.

This will raise hysterical screeches from its true-believers. But, instead they should take a deep breath and tell us how the theory is relevant to the modern biology. For examples let them tell the relevance of the theory to learning…the discovery and function of hormones…[long list of scientific disciplines truncated]

Dr Skell is a sad case. He apparently repeats his mantra that biology has no need of evolution everywhere he goes, and has never bothered to actually crack a biology journal open to see if biologists actually do use the theory. In my reply to him, I did briefly list how evolution is used in every single one of his numerous examples, but today I'm going to focus on just the one I quoted above: hormones.

Now I'm not an endocrinologist, and I don't usually read much in the hormone literature, so it was just chance that I stumbled across a review article on this very topic in BioEssays. My point is that you don't have to be an expert in the discipline to find evidence that Skell is completely wrong; all it takes is a casual perusal of the general scientific literature and a prepared mind (alas, I fear that creationists don't do the first and lack the second. One of the reasons I am concerned about science education in grade schools is that one of the aims of the creationist movement is to make sure our kids lack prepared minds, too.)

The review paper by Heyland et al. (2004a) is well worth looking up. It has a long introduction that covers several important themes in modern evo-devo, that I'll just summarize briefly here.

Continue reading "Evolution of Hormone Signaling" (on Pharyngula)