The Baha'i Studies Listserv
This morning I was paging through photographs in the book "What is
Life?" (Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, 1995-2000) when Plate 17
caught my attention.
Some of you might recall a minor curiosity that came up in one of the
Baha'i listservs or Newsgroups around 15 years ago. Someone had come
across a cross-sectional micrograph of an alga called Chlamydomonas
reinhardii - see:
http://bahai-library.com/1477
and
http://bahai-library.com/chlamydomonas_microscopic_images
for more specifics - where there is a reproduction of a 1974 article
from "Journal of Cell Science".
The point of vague interest being that some of the cross sections
through this alga look like nine-pointed stars with nine Arabic
letters Ha attached to the points. To a Baha'i, they can have a
rather striking and suggestive appearance.
At the time of the earlier discussion, it was assumed (apparently,
none of us being biologists) that this was a unique and obscure
little life form that someone had just happened to take a cross
section of, resulting in this very curious image.
So, this morning I was a little surprised to see a similar image in
this book, with the description: "Undulipodium in cross section. The
shaft (axoneme) displays the 9(2)+2 arrangement of
microtubules. This distinct intracellular organization is found in
the sperm cells of widely diverse beings throughout the natural
world, from men to ginkgo trees. Electron micrographs of cuts
through the shafts of the cilia propelling swimming paramecia and
trichomonads and the cilia that push the egg through a woman's
fallopian tube also reveal this 9(2)+2 pattern."
Turns out, rather than being unique to Chlamydomonas reinhardii, this
pattern is very common in nature.
Similar pictures can be seen on the Wikipedia pages for "Flagellum"
and "Axoneme":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axoneme
Strange minutia.
John B.
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