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The. Baby. Had. A. Foot. In. His. Brain.

December 19th, 2008 7 Comments

I’m sorry, but I’m fascinated with this story. And now there are pictures.

Pictures of the foot.

In the baby’s brain.

Posted in Science, Weird |
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7 Responses to “The. Baby. Had. A. Foot. In. His. Brain.”

  1. iggy says:
    December 19, 2008 at 8:57 am

    I assume that the baby was basically a siamese twin that failed to develop in a normal manner.

  2. Rheinhard says:
    December 19, 2008 at 10:16 am

    Iggy – no, that is most likely not the case. A so called “siamese twin” is a separate individual which started developing very early in the embryonic development process, before the undifferentiated “stem” cells have basically decided what they’re going to be (a foot, a hand, an eye, etc). This is most likely an example of the potentiality within the cells of a single individual to recapitualte the whole from much later in the development process. Seriously, read PZ’s commentary on this. I’ll excerpt a key paragraph (emphases mine):

    there are things called teratomas, where a particular kind of cancer recapitulates a developmental program and builds tissues, things like skin with hair or teeth or chunks of muscle and bone and gland, but those aren’t this well organized. They tend not to produce complete organs, but partially differentiated sheets and lumps. Another possibility is fetus in fetu, where a fragment of the very early embryo is isolated and begins its own independent pattern of normal development, and then is engulfed by the larger and faster growing sibling embryo. Sometimes people late in life will be surprised to learn that there is a partially developed twin imbedded deep in their body. There is no question in any of these cases, however, that the tissue is not an autonomous individual. It is a piece of human-derived tissue that has executed part of the program of cell:cell interactions and induction that these kinds of cells are capable of doing.

    Some years ago I read an absolutely wonderful book called MUTANTS by evolutionary biologist Armand LeRoi. A detailed and not too technical (but still in-depth) look at all the weird ways our genetic program can go “off kilter”. I highly recommend it if you really want to understand what’s going on here at more than a superficial level. I feel the book also essentially gives a great riposte (though I don’t think this was its intent) to folks who fatuously claim we’re perfectly designed beings – there’s just way too much goofy crud in our genome that can get screwed up at the drop of a hat for it all to have been put in there deliberately.

  3. rjpb says:
    December 19, 2008 at 2:59 pm

    Ain’t that a kick in the head.

    Clearly an example of Intelligent Design at work.

  4. midderpidge says:
    December 19, 2008 at 5:50 pm

    It’s the Manitou!!!!

    Call Tony Curtis.

  5. Illuminati says:
    December 19, 2008 at 6:01 pm

    Just like me, born with a foot in my mouth.

  6. Apsaras says:
    December 20, 2008 at 11:18 am

    Someone needs to fire the intelligent designer

  7. The Reality-Based Dave says:
    December 22, 2008 at 5:23 pm

    The “intelligent designer” broke the yolk on that one, so had to change it to scrambled! HA!

    *******************************************
    “…there’s just way too much goofy crud in our genome that can get screwed up at the drop of a hat…”

    Natural selection favors the easily adaptable.