Fish weren't able to evolve anything. Something evolved in certain fish.
The different ways of saying it communicate different premises. The fish have no agency in their own evolution. More importantly, there is no agency, it's just so ething that happens.
If you're going to complain about the way a question was asked, I think you should at least try to answer the question as though it were phrased in a better way. Otherwise people might be forgiven for assuming you don't actually know the answer and are complaining about phrasing/tone to mask your inability to actually answer what the asker was getting at.
>“So, the next step in terms of human health would be to examine this region in databases of human genes to see how much variation there is in normal people and whether some deletions or mutations in this region could lead to a lowered expression of sodium channels, which might result in disease.”
Actually, I think the next interesting step would be to look for a similar gene mutation in those humans who have claimed that street lights dim as they pass or that they are sensitive to electromagnetic radiation.
Or even more cool - we could induce this genetic change in humans so that we all produce electric energy available on demand and then design clothing that allows us to harvest and use this energy. We would all be self-contained generators and accessing this power could be made as simple as using a silicone dongle that fits over your little finger or other convenient appendage with an adapter for any device on the other end. Fingertip chargers for your phones!
Imagine if you will an electric automobile that you own that can only be started when there is a driver in the seat who has connected the vehicle's electronics to their own body, authenticating themselves to the vehicle. You could lock a vehicle to a specific person while still enabling a valet mode that provides highly limited functionality to a non-authenticatable operator.
This vehicle needs no batteries since the power is supplied by the operator and as long as the operator is still alive and connected the vehicle can be driven.
I'm no electrical engineer or geneticist and I don't play one in my driveway but this seems like a great use case for gene-editing technology. Elimination of the need for batteries could stop a lot of environmental degradation from the mining and processing of ores. If we all could be self-contained powerpacks then there would be no need for batteries.
I wonder whether this means that a user would need to consume more calories to supply all that energy. That might strain food resources globally. Hmmmm, a lot to consider here.
Y'all are smart. I'm sure you'll identify all the hurdles to conquer and come up with some cool tech in the process. I'll work on more bullshit ideas.
Well, you tickled my curiosity. Electric eels can produce up to 1 kilovolt at up to 1 amp as low frequency AC. That's about a kilowatt of instantaneous power. The problem is they can only do it for a few milliseconds. While electric eels can shock continuously every few seconds for multiple-hour periods, that seems to be very much on the "low setting". When dealing with e.g. alligators they'll give maybe a dozen full power blasts over a minute and then they need a nap.
That works out to about 200 joules of energy released over the period. Enough to run a small LED lightbulb for about 15 minutes. But you've burned a whole day's worth of eel-calories. May be more feasible as a weight-loss technique than a way to recharge your laptop.
Maybe if we tweaked the gene expression so that it only affects body hairs, effectively turning each hair into a wind-powered generator. The individual contributions might be small but cumulatively may be more significant.
It would be one way to kill the whole barber, hair stylist, and Brazilian wax businesses and taking it further, it would also potentially affect all clothing manufacturers globally by encouraging full nudity which might remove body-shaming issues by promoting health and fitness and better diet choices.
Tattoos become a simple way to set yourself apart and advertisers buy skin billboard space so individuals can monetize their derrieres.
Gillette, Schick, Dollar Shave Club all fade into obscurity or get marginalized as tools only useful for pre-surgery shaves.
Maybe I need to step away from the computer and move on with life. Thanks for reading.
Wouldn't want some jagoff putting me to sleep as he charges his cell phone off my literal back, no thanks, its just poor idea that turns a person into a freakshow of unintended consequences.
Aren't all animals 'electric', like galvanic muscle twitching? Didn't these fish just repurpose existing electrical infrastructure for a different use?
Didn't these fish just repurpose existing electrical infrastructure for a different use?
It's well established nowadays that a gene duplication occurred in the ancestor of all bony fish. That's sometimes a problem for people doing gene knock-out experiments on zebra fish, where you sometimes knock out not only the target but also the homolog because the two are still too similar, despite 425 Myr of evolution.
Land vertebrates do not have this duplication because they are descended from an ancestor of the coelacanth.
What happened with these fish is that they repurposed the backup. They had two Na channel genes, one in muscles, and one spare.
Perhaps parent meant ray-finned fish? Cladistically, we humans are also Osteichthyes, and it isn't clear that we have this particular gene duplication?
In the article, they mention that two different species of electric fish evolved independently, by two separate genetic pathways.
For a long time I believed that if two organisms were phenotypically similar, they must have a nearby common ancestor. But I keep reading more and more about how nature seems to stumble across the same adaptations and mechanisms via many different routes. E.g. what we know as a "tree" is not a distinct phylogenetic branch, but a form that has evolved independently over and over again [1]
Robert Sapolsky talks a bit about how Electric Fish communicate via electricity in this lecture on Ethology [1].
It feels like we're just beginning to discover the extent to which non-human communication blankets the earth. Sounds, colors, chemicals, sub/supersonic vibration, all seem to mediate communication between various species, including plants and fungi.
My First thoughts on reading “... This control region is in most vertebrates, including humans,” was (of course) about some kind of mutant comic-book super-hero/villain. My Second thought was 'sharks with friggin' laser beams'. Sometimes learning stuff is fun :)
