Improvise and flourish

We had seventeen [reindeer] harnessed into one caravan to pull our sledges.... Seven pairs of reindeer alternated with six sledges; the remaining three animals were tied behind as spares....

... I had crossed this area before on horseback, but now [in winter] we sought out paths of a new kind. We did not skirt laboriously around each lake, but instead cascaded down its embankment and flung ourselves onto its hardened surface.

The sudden speed and the spray of ice crystals flung behind ... the reindeer's skidding hooves make it easy to feel that one is about to take off and fly into the air.

That's just a sampler of Piers Vitebsky's unforgettable portrait of life among the Eveny, a herding and hunting people of northeastern Siberia, where the legend of flying reindeer is alive and well ("A Winter Hunt," page 30). The Eveny live in the coldest inhabited place on earth; winter temperatures, even in this age of dramatic warming across much of the Arctic, fall to minus ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit.

The Eveny legend of flying reindeer can be traced to far earlier times than Dasher, Dancer, and other "tiny reindeer." "Reindeer stones" across northern Mongolia and Siberia, emplaced 3,000 years ago, portray antlers swept back to the animals' tails, as if in swooping flight. Eveny elders told Vitebsky of annual, traditional ceremonies that re-enact mythical flights to the sun on the backs of reindeer, purifying each rider and burning away the illnesses of the old year. Vitebsky's account of this remarkable people is the perfect cover feature for the coming winter holidays.

There's a big dose of bricolage in the development and evolution of life. That s the term, left over from the French art scene, for a work made from whatever materials happen to be lying around. (If you've ever thrown a meal together with whatever happens to be in the fridge, or improvised a stage set from an old bedsheet, a few scarves, and a kitchen stool, you'll know what I mean.) In their report from the cutting edge of evolutionary developmental biology ("The Birth of the Uterus," page 36), Vincent J. Lynch and Gunter P. Wagner give an astonishing account of biological bricolage, centered about a group of genes known as Hox genes.

Hox genes occur so ubiquitously in plants and animals that the first Hox gene may have appeared before multicellular organisms emerged in the Precambrian era, some 640 million years ago. For most of that time, the genes have acted as master architects for the body plan along the long axis of an embryonic organism, determining where to grow an insect's leg, a fish's fins, a bird's wing, or a human's arms. Then, 180 million years ago, those same genes were recruited for an entirely new role. Hox genes became major players in the evolution of the uterus, the differentiation of the various parts of the female reproductive system, and the emergence of embryonic development inside the female body--in short, the birth of pregnancy.

With this issue, we close our publication schedule for 2005. We're getting lots of mail about "Darwin & Evolution," published last month, and you'll find a generous selection of readers' letters when we return to your mailbox with our February 2006 issue. Until then, we wish you a splendid holiday season and a joyous New Year!

COPYRIGHT 2005 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning