Integrative Biology of Rattlesnakes Contributions to biology and evolution
M any advances in biology have been due to work on living systems commonly described as model organisms. The phrase "model organism" evokes thoughts of the contributions of research on diverse organisms, such as Arabidopsis thaliana, Caenorhabditis elegans, Aplysia spp., Drosophila melanogaster, Xenopus laevis, and Mus musculus, to equally diverse fields, such as biochemistry, development, physiology, neurobiology, genetics, and evolutionary biology. Despite these clear successes, it is evident that no single organism can answer all questions of interest in biology. Even if a single species were appropriate for the study of all aspects of biology, an obsessive focus on any one model organism to the exclusion of others would surely result in a biased or erroneous perception of the relative importance of various mechanisms that operate in the natural world. Indeed, all organisms may have utility for answering some subset of interesting questions.