On Mon, 5 May 2003 15:25:27 +0000 (UTC), ragland37{at}webtv.net (Michael
Ragland) wrote:

>
>It is useful to understand that someone way back when worked out a
>scheme to build a complex animal body this way that was so successful
>that virtually all animals today use that system.
>
>What seems to have happened is that, in those early days (eons,
>actually) of early eukaryote evolution, is that all sorts of different
>ways of organizing a genome and controlling cell differentiation were
>explored. Finally a scheme of control genes evolved allowing complex
>multicellular organisms with differentiated cell types.
>
>What survived was basically the pattern of blastula/gastrula with three
>germ layers that produces virtually all of the animal phyla we see
>today. There are a few survivors of alternate systems and these are
>found in the sponges and the Cnidaria.
>
>Richard Norman
>
>
>Very informative Mr. Norman. I appreciate you taking the time to educate
>me. As you allude, to really answer many of the questions I have I
>should take some biology courses. I wish they had biology courses which
>taught these concepts without all the technical information and lab. I
>took an introductory biology course many years ago and there was so much
>technical information, thousands of terms, etc. it seemed it could
>occupy all the space on a hard drive. Obviously, it couldn't but you
>know what I mean. I flunked the course and I could tell the instructor
>was disappointed with me. Another time I thought about taking human
>anatomy and physiology and when I went to the bookstore and looked
>through the text it appeared even more complicated than the introductory
>biology was. 
>
>When you take biology courses you don't get a general picture quickly.
>It's an incremental process and you have to take several courses over a
>period of time before you can begin to synthesize this knowledge into a
>tentative general picture. You're so busy at the moment learning about
>specific facts, concepts, etc. you don't have time to think about a
>general picture.
>
>In addition, when you're in school you're usually taking a load of other
>classes and you are under pressure to learn and complete assignments in
>a given period. You can't "learn at your leisure" or let the
information
>really soak into your brain. Except for those who are pursuing biology
>as a career I wouldn't be surprised if the majority forget most of what
>they have learned. They don't retain it. It's like those who took 3
>years of foreign language and you ask them what they know and they
>hardly no nothing.
>
>In any event, I do have an interest in biology and the internet has much
>information on it and there is this newsgroup which has some
>professional biologists on it such as yourself.
>
>Yes, you're right. I was asking the wrong questions pertaining to the
>relationships between the three germ layers. You state, "What seems to
>have happened is that, in those early days (eons, actually) of early
>eukaryote evolution, is that all sorts of different ways of organizing a
>genome and controlling cell differentiation were explored. Finally a
>scheme of control genes evolved allowing complex multicellular organisms
>with differentiated cell types." I think the questions I was attempting
>to articulate regarding the endoderm, ectoderm, and mesoderm can best be
>sought through the tools you mention:   developmental patterns
>supplemented by an increasing understanding of how developmental
>genetics works plus an increasing understanding of genetic sequence
>homologies. As you point out, "All this is the newly developing field of
>"evo-devo", evolutionary developmental biology.
>
>I won't discover the answers myself. Rather those scientists in the
>field of evolutionary developmental biology will continue to make
>discoveries, etc. and when they become public I will read about them and
>they will modify my understanding of what it is to be human.
>

You simply suffer from the very understandable but all too common
affliction of wanting to run before you learn to walk, let alone
crawl.  In fact, you not only want to run, you want to fly, to soar in
a high-performance jet and do loops and rolls and all sorts of fancy
tricks.  Unfortunately, if you really want to understand this stuff,
you do have to pay your dues learning all the details.  And the lab
work is incredibly important.  That is where you really learn the
difference between what is and what merely might be.  If you do your
"research" simply by surfing the internet, you find too many people
speculating about too many things with no real data behind them.  Only
through careful experiments and the proper interpretation of the
results can we really extend our knowledge of biology.  And these
experiments have grown enormously in complexity and conceptual design
over the past several decades so it really does require years of
apprenticeship to fully understand what is happening.
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