Let Your Fingers Do The Thinking

Another morning beginning with Peter Limberger's Collective Journaling Zoom Call...

Quote of the Day:  "Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." - Isaac Asimov

Prompt: Free write today and let your fingertips do the thinking.
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I read an article last week, about the possible origin of fingers. I never really wondered, though I have wondered why we have 10 (or 8 and 2 thumbs). And then there are the toes…

“Fish Buttholes May Be The Reason We Now Have Fingers, Study Finds”
[ https://www.sciencealert.com/fish-buttholes-may-be-the-reason-we-now-have-fingers-study-finds ]

Sometimes, editors have too much fun coming up with catchy headlines. And in today’s “fake news” environment, I double-checked the source, a Nature article.

“Co-option of an ancestral cloacal regulatory landscape during digit evolution”
[ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09548-0 ]

It’s science at work, that investigative process of finding that which resists bias (can be confirmed by all). Now, I love science. I love the idea that, as a species, we share knowledge, especially knowledge that helps me survive. But aside from how this knowledge will help ME, I was disturbed by a line in the abstract of the Nature article:

“We genetically evaluated the function of the zebrafish Hoxd regulatory landscapes by comparatively assessing the effects of their full deletions. We show that, unlike in mice, deletion of these regions in fish does not disrupt hoxd gene transcription during distal fin development. By contrast, we found that this deficiency leads to the loss of expression within the cloaca…”

Full deletions? Loss of expression within the cloaca? I think this means that these scientists genetically altered zebrafish so they didn’t have buttholes. NOT COOL!

 

 

When I was 12, I had a fish tank. Zebrafish were a favorite, along with angelfish. I loved my fish. They were always happy to see me. I’d read about "Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys(1)" in comic books, so I enjoyed training my fish to swim to the top of the tank whenever I waved my yellow-brown plastic containter of “TetraMin” over the surface. I never got the fish to follow a flashlight, but they sure loved that yellow-brown TetraMin container. The food in the container was flaky, flat wafers of flattened flies? Later in my life I would notice that nori, the thin, flat, rolled sheets of dried seaweed used to wrap rice for sushi, felt and smelled a lot like my TetraMin. I never tried eating TetraMin. Kept thinking about those smooshed flies…

My fish tank needed to be cleaned regularly, a discipline I was not happy about. If I didn’t clean my fish tank, the glass would gradually turn green with algae. I was told this was bad for the fish, but in my mind, it was part of the ecology (I planted trees during the first “Earth Day” in April, 1970). But my mother had a ways of convincing me (aka my father), so I religiously cleaned my fish tank when it took on a green tinge.

Just an aside about fish and fish tanks, when I cleaned the tank, I had to replace all the water. I took great care to make sure the new water was at room temperature before putting the fish back in. I knew what it was like getting into a cold bath!

And what a happy day when I found a sucker fish, Otocinclus catfish, that would eat the algae off the glass! I still had to clean the fish tank, though, when it started to smell too much like fish.

My point is, getting back to this experiment, that I loved my fish. The idea of genetically altering a zebrafish so it had no butthole seems cruel and unusual. I know I’m different than zebrafish, but I wouldn’t want some alien species to come to Earth and decide to genetically alter me! Does the golden rule (or platimum or silver for that matter) not apply to other species?

I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 19, partly because of the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man", where aliens come to Earth offering peace and advanced technology. The aliens invite humans to join them on their further journey, and leave a book on Earth for the other humans. Initially, the title of the book is translated: "To Serve Man", but it is later discovered that the book is a cookbook!

Well, enough s!*% out of these fingers for today! Love always!





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(1) Here is what Gemini AI had to say about Sea-Monkeys:

The comic book advertisement you are referring to is for 
Sea-Monkeys. The ads, which ran heavily in comic books during the 1960s and 70s, promised "Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys" that could be trained and would follow a flashlight beam. 

Key details about the advertisements and the creatures themselves:

• The real animals: Sea-Monkeys are actually a specialized breed of brine shrimp (scientific name Artemia NYOS).

• The marketing hype: The comic book advertisements, often illustrated by artist Joe Orlando, featured highly personified, cartoonish characters with crowns and smiling human-like faces. The ads promised "a bowlful of happiness".

• The flashlight trick: While the ads claimed you could train them, the shrimp's habit of swimming toward a light source is not a learned trick but a natural biological reflex called phototaxis.

• The inventor: The product was invented by Harold von Braunhut, who also created other novelties like X-Ray Spex and Invisible Goldfish.

• The reality: Many customers were disappointed to discover the creatures were tiny, translucent brine shrimp that looked nothing like the illustrations and often died quickly.