Out with the old dogma, “It evolved!”
In with the new realism, “Just the Facts”
“I really wanted to understand how spiders make spinnerets, and how their legs may have been modified over time [SHL] to make them. What’s the genetic architecture of the web-weaving appendages?” says Setton. “I am interested in how you make novel structures — how do they evolve [SHL] and how does nature create novelty at the genetic level?”
Alas. Setton, one of the novitiates in the lab of Indoctrinator Prashant Sharma, fails to find the desired understanding.
“My advisor wants to know why daddy long legs (or harvestmen, which are not spiders) have long legs. I want to know: How do spiders weave webs?” Setton explains. “The answer is, we don’t know. We don’t know how silk is made or how the spinnerets and the spigots in spinnerets are made, at the genetic level. There is so much we don’t know; my inner child wants to know.”
The Indoctrinator takes pity over the pleading eyes of the child. “The work is hard, and there’s virtually no playbook,” Tyrrell laments. So the Indoctrinator sends her student out to hunt tarantulas, hoping that the enlightenment may one day come.
By chance in the forest, the student may experience tiny sparks of
understanding about the mysterious ways of chance. Perhaps they were
just spontaneous flashes in her retina, but Setton may interpret them as
fleeting glimpses of Darwinian insight, to use some future day as
motivations to indoctrinate the next generation." CEH