The Extended Phenotypics Institute

It is the beautiful Indian summer of 2032, opening day of EPI, the Extended Phenotypics Institute in one of our great university cities. After the formal unveiling by a Nobel Prizewinning scientst (Royalty wasn’t considered good enough), the guests are shown wonderingly around the new building. There are three wings: the Zoological Artefact Museum (ZAM), the laboratory of Parasite Extended Genetics (PEG), and the Centre for Action at a Distance (CAD).

The artefact museum is a zoological equivalent of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers, which differs from other museums of human artefacts in that its specimens are grouped functionally instead of by region of origin. Instead of sections devoted to Polynesia, Africa, Asia and pre-Columbian America, the Pitt Rivers has sections devoted to fishing nets, to wind instruments, to boats, to butchering tools, to ornamental headdresses, all gathered together with their own kind regardless of their geographic provenance. EPI’s museum has all the nests together, whether made by birds, insects, mammals or spiders; all the hunting nets in another case, whether made by spiders or caddis larvae; all the sexually alluring bowers in a third, and so on. Where possible, each specimen is housed next to human equivalents, and next to functionally analogous pieces of animal anatomy: lyre bird tails next to bower bird bowers, thermoregulatory heat-exchange organs next to termite mound chimneys, and so on. A central display case shows the comparative anatomy of bird nests, each one perched on its rightful branch of a phylogenetic tree: an expanded version of the tree drawn by Winkler and Sheldon (1993) for Swallows’ nests.

All around the Museum are laboratories devoted to the genetics of animal artefacts. Some would say this is, strictly speaking, the genetics of their builders, but of course the ethos of EPI acknowledges no such distinction. Artefact genetics differs from conventional genetics in that the genes whose effects bear upon any one phenotype may come from different ‘organisms’. Geneticists are used to handling such summations and epistatic interactions within ‘organisms’ under the heading of polygenes, and our extended geneticists are well versed in the mathematical theory of polygenic inheritance (Falconer 1981). Studies in the artificial selection and genetic manipulation of silkworm cocoons enjoy a generous grant from Japan, which also supports a major project on the genetics and polymer chemistry of other silk artefacts such as spider webs and caddis larva fishing nets. The artefact museum serves as the home base for field studies of the memetics of tool making and tool use in chimpanzees, sea otters, Galapagos woodpecker finches and others.

The other two wings can be imagined by analogy with the first, and by reference to Chapters 12 and 13 of The Extended Phenotype. PEG, the laboratory of Parasite Extended Genetics, is the most prosperously endowed part of the Institute, because of the medical importance of parasite genes expressing themselves in host phenotypes. As for CAD, Centre for Action at a Distance, its generous grant from agricultural funds is prompted by the hope that artificially synthesized pheromones could revolutionise pest control. But CAD’s total remit embraces nothing less than the entire field of animal communication studies and, broader yet, networks of interaction in community ecology. 

In all three wings, familiar phenomena are studied from an unfamiliar perspective: different angles on a Necker cube. Everyone knows that parasites manipulate their hosts. The extended geneticists of PEG differ only in that they study variations in host behaviour and morphology as phenotypes of parasite genes. Even more than their colleagues in the artefact museum, they are never far from their well-thumbed copy of Falconer’s textbook, and they are as nearly as possible indifferent to their polygenes’ ‘organisms’ of origin. The ethologists and zoosemioticists of CAD run the risk of being  mistaken for Gaian eco-mystics, as they immerse themselves in the dawn chorus and call it extended embryology. But, like their colleagues in the other two wings of EPI, they pride themselves on the disciplined rigour of their theory. The motto carved over the main door of their Institute is a one-locus mutation of St Paul: “But the greatest of these is clarity.”