From Hopeful Monsters to Morphogenetic Prototypes

Turtles as hopeful monsters.

A recently published study on the development of the turtle shell highlights the important role that development plays in the origin of evolutionary novelties. The evolution of the highly derived adult anatomy of turtles is a prime example of a macroevolutionary event triggered by changes in early embryonic development. Early ontogenetic deviation may cause patterns of morphological change that...

The Return of Hopeful Monsters

Big Brother, the tyrant of George Orwell's 1984, directed his daily Two Minutes Hate against Emmanuel Goldstein, enemy of the people. When I studied evolutionary biology in graduate school during the mid-1960s, official rebuke and derision focused upon Richard Goldschmidt, a famous geneticist who, we were told, had gone astray. Although 1984 creeps up on us, I trust that the world will not be i...

The Emergence of Bacterial “Hopeful Monsters”

The global spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has largely been driven by the dissemination of successful lineages. A particularly important example is sequence type (ST) 258 of Klebsiella pneumoniae, a common cause of health care-associated infections. Representatives of this lineage carry a variable array of plasmid-borne resistance genes, typically including a carbapenemase effective aga...

Chickens First Speciation by “Hopeful Monsters” in Fraternal Supertwins

The idea of “hopeful monster” was proposed by Goldschmidt who envisioned that speciation could occur instantaneously via major chromosomal rearrangement in a onestep process; but he could not unravel how similar individual in the opposite sex to appear on the same time and location to generate next generation. This paper provides the answer for the challenge. In this paper, a model of speciatio...

Biomedical illustration: From monsters to molecules