The Locust and the Wookiee Cellist Phenotypes

The grasshopper (left) and the locust (right) are simply two different expressions of the same genome


An intriguing piece David Dobbs at Aeon Magazine is basically a rallying call to put to rest the supremacy of genes as the primary or sole driver of evolution. Dobbs begins the piece by describing a talk he attended at a neuroscience convention by Steve Rogers (no, not Steve “Captain America” Rogers) of Cambridge University which basically demonstrates that locusts and grasshoppers are not only closely related, they are really just different the same species which are simply the result of different gene expressions of the same genetic material.

As Dobbs states:



Dobbs explains that:


A veritable Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde (or to go back to the Marvel Comics references, Dr. Banner/Incredible Hulk –well, technically there is a Mr. Hyde in the Marvel Universe too, but…)

Why does this happen, well:



This is simply an adaptive behavioral change spurred on by environmental pressures which cause a different set of expression from the very same genes we find in both the grasshopper and the locust.

It’s not a whole lot different (metaphorically speaking) than what I describe in my post about Diversifying Your Performance Skills Portfolio. We could morph from a Baroque Cellist to a Wookiee Cellist with the same level of ease that a grasshopper can morph to a locust.

Jon Silpayamanant (from l. to r.) as a baroque cellist, an improvising cellist, a steampunk cellist, and the Wookiee cellist.


Some of you might say, “Hey, no fair–these performing personae aren’t aren’t gene expressions that transform your physical body and behavior.  You have to acquire a Baroque Cello and a Wookiee Costume to get into those roles.” While not untrue (and I could simply respond that I’m being “metaphorical” here), we can always look at these different performing roles as simply the gene expressions on the extended phenotypes that constitute the immediate environment that support these roles.

Yeah, it’s a bit ironic that I’d use a concept created by Richard Dawkins to illustrate this given that the original piece was an overt attack of his Selfish Gene idea, but basically we can reduce all the performing roles to sets of phenotypes that are simply extensions of gene expressions.  A prototypical phenotype would be, say, eye color.  If you recall your high school biology (or even junior high science class) and the classic laws of inheritance first discovered by Gregor Mendel we can take a trait (i.e. phenotype) like eye color and construct a probability of inheritance.  With eye color, Brown (B) is a dominant gene and Blue (b) is a recessive gene, and we can use a Punnett square to show the frequency of any eye color of any offspring given the eye color of the parents.

The only way to get an offspring with blue eyes is if both parents have blue eyes (bb x bb = 4bb) or if both parents have both a dominant and recessive eye color gene (Bb x Bb = 1BB + 2Bb + 1bb).  Two parents with two dominant genes (BB) will only have offspring with brown eyes (BB x BB = 4BB).  The eye color is the phenotype.

Aki Inomata's Crystalline 3D Printed Hermit Crab Shells

Aki Inomata’s Crystalline 3D Printed Hermit Crab Shells

Dawkins, in his extended phenotype book, says that we should consider non-biological processes as well as biological process as phenotypes of genes.  One example he gave in the book (if I’m recalling it correctly) is a beaver dam which, when built, floods a small region around a beaver lodge so a beaver may have water that is deep enough for the underwater entrance.  The damn and the flooded region are extended phenotypes.  The houses we live in are extended phenotypes as much as beaver lodges and the flooded regions surrounding them.  Hermit crabs, which inhabit the shells of other creatures (or other suitable objects), have simply appropriated a home which is simply an extended phenotype.

My Baroque Cello and Wookiee Costumes are simply extended phenotypes.

This is all a simplified view, but the point is that Locusts exist because of the interaction of genes and the environment.  Without the right conditions, the alternate expression of genes that morph grasshoppers into locusts won’t happen.  Without the range of expression a grasshopper’s genome can have, no amount of environmental change will turn it into a locust.

That’s why I said, in my “Diversifying Your Performance Skills Portfolio” post, this:



I think that one of the failures of the Classical Music Crisis debate is similar to the problem that Dobbs mentions with regards to the reception (and dominance) of the Selfish Gene and gene-centric model of biology and genetics:


It’s a simplistic meme, the Classical Music Crisis one, and it leads to all kinds of distortions of the history of Classical Music in general, as well as in the US.  None of which does us any good when we’re trying to envision the future of Classical Music because if we don’t really understand its past, we might simply be repeating the mistakes already made at best.  At worst, we might not even see that future even if it’s already been with us for awhile because we wouldn’t be able to differentiated it from any other point in history.

We have to understand the environment that Classical Music evolved in and adapted to, and understand how forces shaped similar organizations–at the risk of oversimplifying, we need to know how these phenotypes interact with each other and the broader environment or we’ll simply be a grasshopper without the ability to morph into a locust.

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