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February 15, 2005

Pharyngeal Phantasies?

As I was checking out this post at New Covenant, I thought about an question that I have been pondering.  Rusty's post responded of a post from Pharyngula, in which PZ Myers often gives us his evolutionary wisdom.  I was looking at this post by PZ, in which he asserts that there are "deep homologies" in the development of the parathyroid glands in land-dwelling animals to the gills of fish.

This reminded me of this article by PZ that asserts that the "gill slits" of the early embryo gives evidence for macroevolution.

Why should human embryos have tails and build their faces from the same embryonic foundation that fish use to build gills? These are questions that Wells fails to address, and his approach seems to be to try to argue instead that they do not exhibit similarities as embryos.  Yet they do. These similarities argue for common ancestry.

An admission: I did not like studying head and neck embryology in my training, and I did not know anyone that did.  As PZ's post states, most of the structure of the face developed form these "gill slits" or pharyngeal arches present in the embryo.  We were responsible for knowing which facial structure derived from which pharyngeal arch.

The easiest way to remember the embryonic derivation came from an interesting anatomical fact.  Each one of the pharyngeal arches are innervated by a different cranial nerve.  Since I already knew which nerve innervated the structures of the face, it was easy to use this knowledge to remember the embryonic derivation of any facial structure.  You can see that each arch uses a different cranial nerve here.  For instance, I would remember that the digastric muscle, which was innervated by both cranial nerve V (anterior belly from the first arch) and cranial nerve VII (posterior belly from the second arch) was derived from the first and second pharyngeal arches.  This is confirmed here.  You can even pretend to be a med student in gross anatomy and see these muscles in a cadaver here.  (and yes, that's what it really looks like).

I always thought this was interesting, and it seemed to make sense.  The derivatives of the pharyngeal arches were all associated with a different cranial nerve.  However, I had an interesting question. If humans build their face using "the same embryonic foundation that fish use to build gills", then we would expect that fish gills would be innervated in a similar (homologous) way as the human face.  In other words, it would use CN V (first arch), VII (2nd arch), IX (3rd arch), and X 4th and 6th arch to innervate the gills.  If all of these cranial nerves are not associated with fish gills, this would call into question that the pharyngeal arches are actual derivatives of fish gills.

Embryos of the fish also have cranial nerves associated with each of pharyngeal arches.  I've never dissected a fish in order to examine its cranial nerves, but this paper was a study in which certain cranial nerves were cut to examine the effect on fish respiration.  Here is a diagram of the cranial nerves on this fish:

Jeb4003f1

As you can see, only cranial nerve X and IX innervate the gills.  Cranial nerves V and VII have nothing to do with the gills.

Question: if the structures of the human face evolved from gills in a fish, why are CN V and VII, derivatives of the first and second pharyngeal arches, not present in fish gills?

Posted by OMFSerge | February 15, 2005 | Permalink

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» Creationist Confusion about pharyngeal homologies from Pharyngula
Creationists come up with the weirdest criticisms. Serge at Imago Dei disagrees with my claim that humans build their face using "the same embryonic foundation that fish use to build gills", calling them "pharyngeal phantasies". He ... [Read More]

Tracked on Feb 17, 2005 3:14:41 PM

Comments

OMFSerge writes,

As you can see, only cranial nerve X and IX innervate the gills. Cranial nerves V and VII have nothing to do with the gills.

Question: if the structures of the human face evolved from gills in a fish, why are CN V and VII, derivatives of the first and second pharyngeal arches, not present in fish gills?

I'm no developmental biologist, but even I can spot a couple of assumptions in your post that are probably in error.

1. You say, "Cranial nerves V and VII have nothing to do with the gills." But the graphic you posted shows that they have to do with the jaws and the face of the fish. The common ancestor of that fish and Homo sapiens obviously had jaws also. You seem to be assuming that evolution says that mammalian jaws evolved from the back gills of fish, rather than from the jaws of fish. This is a ludicrous depiction of the actual model.

2. The actual model is rather more like this:
(a) start with a jawless fish with no jaws but lots of gill arches
(b) the first few gill arches evolve into jaws
(c) much later, this now-jawed lineage splits into teleost fish (most modern "fish") on the one hand, and tetrapods+lungfish and relatives on the other.

(By the way, "fish" becomes a hairy term in these discussions, because phylogenetically speaking, what we call "fish" are paraphyletic and not a natural group. Tetrapods are just a highly modified "fish", phylogenetically speaking.)

Here is one of hundreds of webpages/articles giving this basic model for the origin of jaws:

The conventional view dates to a nineteenth-century German anatomist named Karl Gegenbaur. Gegenbaur noted a resemblance between the jaws of embryonic sharks--among the more primitive of jawed fishes--and skeletal arches, behind the mouth in all fish, which support the gills. Gegenbaur proposed that the front most gill arches had become enlarged in some jawless fishes, allowing the mouth to clamp down on a wriggling victim. This innovation gradually led to full-blown jaws.

Better yet, here is a nice diagram: http://www.biologycorner.com/bio2/notes33.html

It's possible I'm missing some fundamental point here, but it seems strange that these considerations didn't enter at all into your critique of PZ Myer's article...


Short version:

OMFSerge said,

As you can see, only cranial nerve X and IX innervate the gills. Cranial nerves V and VII have nothing to do with the gills.

Question: if the structures of the human face evolved from gills in a fish, why are CN V and VII, derivatives of the first and second pharyngeal arches, not present in fish gills?

Answer: Because V and VII are in the fish jaws, and fish jaws are modified versions of gill arches in jawless "fish".

If I'm anywhere near right about this, will you concede that there might be a bit more to this evolution stuff than you previously thought?

Posted by: Nick | Feb 16, 2005 4:03:08 AM

Nick,

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I am aware of the proposed mechanism of jaw development. It is a great story. SJ Gould has a great article in Natural History entitled "A Jawful of Ear" (1990) that details the transformation of the gill arch from the second pharyngeal arch into the stapes of the middle ear. Great story, but I'm looking for some evidence.

If the proposed mechanism were true, then I would expect 2 things:

1. Some evidence that all of the cranial nerves associated with the pharyngeal arches innervate gills in an organism of the class agnatha.

2. Evidence that each individual gill is innervated by a different cranial nerve (or branch of a particular cranial nerve.)

Evidence of both of these may exist, and I'd be interested in it. We often here of how the pharyngeal arches "look like gills", but I find the distribution of the cranial nerves are far more interesting. This post is more of a thought provoker than anything else.

Serge

Posted by: Serge | Feb 16, 2005 11:03:15 AM

1 and 2 are both utter non sequiturs. There is no presumption that there is an in-register metameric relationship between the CNS and peripheral pharyngeal tissues, or that there is a one-to-one mapping of a CNS unit to an arch, or even that there is a simple underlying metameric organization to the cranial nerves. In fact, there's pretty good evidence that all of that is false (or at least so thoroughly distorted by time that the relationships are obscure). You are demanding observations to fit predictions evolution does not make.

In fact, your post here is the equivalent of the lame creationist demand to see a dog evolve into a cat before they will believe in evolution, just dressed up with a few more obscure terms which you obviously do not understand yourself. You really might want to actually understand something about pharyngeal embryology when you're trying to critique an argument about pharyngeal embryology.

Posted by: PZ Myers | Feb 17, 2005 7:13:17 PM

Reading over this discussion, I'm wondering whether any such resemblance is evidence for homology and common descent. Similar appearance isn't enough, and neither is a similar genetic signature, if I understand the issue correctly. Some organisms arrive at similar structures with strikingly different developmental pathways. So don't we require in-depth knowledge of the developmental pathways, Dr. Myers, to come to the conclusion you have?

Posted by: Steve | Feb 19, 2005 10:24:25 AM

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