The AAAS, for being a society for the advancement of science, should really consider and open-publishing system like we've been seeing from PNAS and PLoS. In particular, this week there is a special issue dealing with evolution of organ systems, and these are just really interesting articles that would be great for the advancement of science.

For starters, I'd send people over to read this review of the evolution of the heart from the viewpoint of gene regulation. It's from Eric Olson, a leader in the field of cardiac and smooth muscle research, and it's an interesting look at how as organisms vascular systems get progressively more complex, the number of variations on a similar set of genes increases. In other words, lots of new genes aren't being created from scratch (duh) but an increase in numbers of variants of critical cardiac transcription factors emerge.



Then there's the discussion of hox gene clusters from Derek Lemons and William McGinnis which demonstrates a similar theme, the importance of the numbers of and variable expression of a limited set of control factors can result in huge changes in morphology and complexity. PZ will love that one no doubt.

And finally Casting a Genetic Light on the Evolution of Eyes from Russell D. Fernald is a wonderful discussion about the various ways organisms have adapted to detect light, often these adaptations were in parallel, but developed the same basic systems. It's also nice because the impossibility of the evolution of the eye is an old denialist/creationist saw, when in reality, it's quite easy to see how we moved from simple to extreme complexity by comparing eyes in various other species to our own.

Great reading, but only for those who have institutional subscriptions or AAAS membership. Sorry. One of these days AAAS will wake up and move to an open publishing model.