Hox, Curtis, & Kuby: Their 3rd Anniversary

WABC (770 AM, New York Citeee!) chose opposites for a talk-show partnership and offered choices to listeners: Curtis Sliwa and Ron Kuby. The two hosts drew a larger audience than either of them could alone. Attorney Kuby: communist, former associate of William Kunstler, 1st Amendment specialist, and general counsel to the Latin Kings and the Gambino crime family. An athiest with a formidable vocabulary who lives with rather than marries his lady. Sliwa: founder of the Guardian Angels, nearly assassinated (by the Gambinos?) in the back of a cab, and a strenuous prowar activist. He is a married, anti-union deist with a terrible vocabulary and worse diction but proud of his mixed metaphors, neologisms, and hip hop jargon. Kuby annoys little old lady conservatives to the point they flip him off in public: Sliwa rattles the liberal narcissists in Manhattan, Long Island, and Connecticut. He, a defiant slow learner, still tattles on the underworld.

According to the station's promos, Sliwa prevents Kuby from saying something so outrageous that WABC would have to fire him. Kuby brokers deals with the underworld so that Sliwa is not shot again. The program director, Phil Boyce, ensured that each of these manics had a clear interest in the other's survival.When asked how he tolerates Sliwa, Kuby explains: "I get paid." Sliwa to the same question reacts: "I take Prozac."

It really is a marriage that recruits a larger environment otherwise known as "listening audience."

This partnership illustrates many of the same compromises and benefits that we might expect to find in genetic partnerships that emerge whenever a stray virus joins a clump of DNA. Change occurs and the new organism discovers what it can do and finds places where it can do those things. Physical environments do not create new gene sequences although extreme temperature, radiation, and dehydration can turn off existing sequences and activate older ones that were previously mute. Incremental change makes larger, more complex organisms and favors the discovery of ecological opportunities...outcomes from polygenetic receptor preferences, genetic variation, and stable environments. Analog environments play the codes of digital genes and very resilient genes restrict the kinds and intensity of signals to which they respond. Lady giraffes like taller male giraffes, the length of whose neck has less to do with reaching higher leaves and more to do with head-butting other male giraffes and impressing female giraffes and hominid photographers. (Pax 6 feeds eyes and Sony lenses?)

We are a set of Leggos. Thus, we find that camels and llamas produce viable young but hybrid saltacid spiders within a single generation will breed with each other but not with either parent's stock. We nearly all have the same pharyngula stage even though some of us start in an egg shell and others do not (Raff, 1996). Gradualism applies to changes within a species and less to separations between them. Carroll (2003, p. 853) suggests "...there is a gene repertoire that is qualitatively nearly identical among mammals." He should add birds to his list. Starlings sing like morning disk jockeys and aging psychologists write their dawn fantasies and want to fly one more time...

Life really is a marriage.

References

Rutherford, S. L. & Lindquist, S. (1998) Hsp as a capacitor for morphological evolution. Nature. 396. 336-342.
Quitsch, C, Sanster, T A, & Lindquist, S. (2002) Hsp90 as a capacitor of phenotypic variation. Nature, 417, 618-624.
Carroll, S. B., Grenier, J., & Weatherbee, S. (2001) From DNA to Diversity: Molecular Genetics and the Evolution of Animal Design. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Carroll, Sean B. (2003) Genetics and the making of Homo sapiens. Nature. 422, 849-857.
Gould, S. (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Belknap.
Margulis, L. & Sagan, D. (2002) Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species. NY: Basic Books.
Raff, Rudolf (1996) The Shape of Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Copyright 2003, James Brody, all rights reserved.

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Flocking and C&W, by James Brody, 11/07/03

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