It just seems like it would be a really cool thing to have gills and be able to populate the oceans in the same way we populate the land. We could have houses and shops and vehicles, andgo on walks/swims and just kind of live underwater.
Start a whole new second species of human here on earth maybe, Who knows?
In short, we could, but the cost would be incredible.
All vertebrates are animals that develop from a series of segments, with a vertebra at the core. In our time from eel-like fish, we’ve specialised these segments so, for example, we have ribs on the vertebra corresponding to the rib cage.
To support arms and legs, specific vertebra have become highly specialised in the form of hips and shoulders.
Gills are composed of a series of gill arches, one on each vertebra in the neck area. These structures have (in eels) a lot of blood vessels to carry the blood that needs reoxygenation.
An interesting thing happened as the eel-like creatures differentiated, evolved jaws and ultimately ended up as mammals and humans: nature co-opted the specific vertebra that had these gill features and turned them into jaws and ears and a variety of other features in the head and neck. For example the tiny bones in your ear were once fish jawbones which were previously one (or more) gill arches.
The stupendously complex anatomy in this area comes from all the short-term ‘decisions’ evolution took to make all the magnificent creatures that inhabit the earth.
For example the nerve that connects the brain to the larynx (the recurrent laryngeal nerve) emerges from a vertebra high up in the neck, decends down under the aorta in the chest and then back up into the neck to the larynx. In the giraffe, the nerve is many meters long, even as it’s direct path could be a few centimeters. The reason is that the heart used to be close to the gills in fish and sharks. As the heart moved in land animals, the nerve was caught in a loop around the critical aorta and it was ‘pulled’ along for the evolutionary ride.
So, in order to turn your gills back on, you need to unprogram 450m years of evolution of the structures you call your head, face and neck.
I’d recommend ‘Your inner fish’ by Shubin - it’s a wonderful read and explains this in far more detail that I can manage.
Fascinating.
If you like this, this goes under the moniker ‘evo/dev’ - evolution of the ‘development’ of the organism. A lot of genes don’t code for proteins that ‘do’ something in the body, like haemoglobin or fingernails - they code proteins that tell the body how to develop from a single cell. Many are active for a short window in development. Some are active in a single location, like at the thumb end of the limb bud, and tell the cells where to become a finger, thumb or palm bone. Some work across vastly different animal classes - the ‘build an eye here’ gene works in humans and flies and everything in-between.
So there isn’t a way to “add” a feature on top of the existing organism’s physical system? We have to lose ribs to get gills? That kinda sucks.
In a way, your jaw is a gill arch, just built in a different way with some interesting diversions. After a couple of 100 million years, the changes do add up.
If you really had to add in a gill, i have a plan, but I need to talk about one important evolutionary trick: duplication and divergence.
A fairly common DNA copying error causes a section of a chromosome to be duplicated in the offpring. In most cases this is fatal or prevents children, but some duplications work out just fine.
For instance mammals lost colour vision in the time of the dinosaurs - mammals were probably nocturnal. The loss was caused by losing genes for the yellow colour receptors in the eye. This is why dogs and cats see in something akin to black and white (they do see red and blue and all the yellows and greens are just shades of red and blue).
But apes were lucky. An accident duplicated the existant red receptor and, over time, because there are now two genes, one gene was gradually selected for a higher and higher light frequency. This has become our green receptor and all apes see in red-green-blue colour.
Duplication is not necessarily fatal because it just codes for something we already have. But once there are 2 genes, evolution can select away for different capabilities and we end up with something new.
Ok, with that out the way let’s plan!
Step 1 might be possible today. Step 2 might be within current reach (but it would take incredible work to disentangle all the connected system in development and the working body. Step 3 is beyond current tech (as I understand).
Fun thought experiment! Thank you!
So do I understand correctly that a certain hox gene is activated in basically all cells which are in the “domain” of a certain vertebrae and they all activate some subset of homeobox genes which in combination with the original hox gene cause them to start turning into all the different parts associated with that vertebrae (so organs and other structures)?
Would we then need an entirely new hox gene to produce even a single gill? (I know you basically just laid out most of a response to this question.) Because I would assume although the exact point at which the development of our arms and legs begins is part of the whole hox gene “superstructure”, but couldn’t we ‘basically just’ highjack this same system and duplicate this gene to produce at least a single gill in the region where the current hox gene for our neck is expressed?
Long story short: what is the biggest reason why we can’t just hack into a later part of the sequence and continue on from there with what you said?
Or would your proposed plan also just end up like this in the final product and you laid it out like this because it’s already the most viable route into this mess? 😅
Yes
Not quite. The hox gene creates a protein that tells the nearby cells that they are in a specific segment. After this specific cells in that segment start signalling so they cooperatively lay out the cardinal directions to make that specific segment. In the shoulder segment, for example, a specific cell becomes the tip of the arm and tells all the cells about it with its signalling protein. All the cells in between it and the root now ‘know’ which part of the arm to grow.
This is a cascade of ever finer positioned ‘location markers’ that guide generic cells to specialise correctly.
Ultimately, as two bones grow into each other, they know to form a joint, and as that joint takes form the joint surfaces fit each other exactly.
Assuming we want to keep our neck, jaw and ear features, we need to keep our existing hox gene and all the genes that turn on in this cascade to produce these structure. If we alter them, our development will change.
The issue is that in a fish or shark, exactly the same location marker is used to lay down their gills. So adding a shark hox gene will result in a human segment at that location. Hox is a marker - not the full set of instructions to build the segment.
We therefore need
Well, we can’t reuse the existing one because it creates human structure. So we need brand new genes for 2 and 3.
I’m not a professional in this area, but I haven’t seen anything that suggests we can fo this yet.
I think part 4 (the bit about creating new tissues) might in fact be the easier part. But to cause them to be developed at the right time in the right place and at the correct size with brand new signals is waaaay out there.
Speaking as someone whose last practical biology wiped out all the very expensive cell colonies, and that was 30 years ago, I hope my wild suggestions here are even vaguely in the right direction.
Fuck it, let’s do it. Super Mario Bros deevolve me