COULD EVOLUTION PRODUCE ITS OWN FLUFFY?

History has many hellhounds. These supernatural dogs from folklore are often guardians to an underworld, the supernatural, or the realm of the dead. And sometimes, even if their name is Fluffy, they guard the Sorcerer’s Stone at Hogwarts Castle.

Bought by Hagrid from a “Greek chappie” at the Leaky Cauldron, Fluffy was a huge and vicious three-headed dog whose greatest weakness was to fall fast asleep at the first sound of music. Harry, Ron, and Hermione first met Fluffy in the forbidden area on the third floor of the Castle. As sharp as ever, Hermione noticed that, like other hellhounds of history, Fluffy was guarding something. He stood on a trap door, which the three later deduced to be the way to the Sorcerer’s Stone.

When the three students met Fluffy once more, Harry had brought along a flute, so that it could be played to help lull Fluffy asleep. Once the Stone was destroyed, and Fluffy’s duties done, Hagrid took Fluffy to the Forbidden Forest, and set him free. Soon after, Dumbledore sent Fluffy back to his native Greece.

The movie version of Fluffy appears to be a breed of English dog, known as a Staffordshire Bull Terrier. And to make the three heads look more realistic, each is given its own personality: one “smart,” one “alert,” and one “sleepy.” But, could evolution produce its own Fluffy?

Many-Headed Monsters

Many-headed monsters have a long pedigree in fantasy. A many-headed Hydra had once born down on a laboring Heracles, son of that “Greek chappie” Zeus. Heracles realized that such a fearsome beast would regrow any head that was chopped off. Now, a multi-headed creature with re-growable body parts is a wonderful feat of the fantastic imagination. But from where do grotesque ideas like Hydra and Fluffy stem? Could fantasy writers have got the concept from nature itself?

Scholars have recorded cases of many-headed specimens for years. In the 1940s, a two-headed pipefish embryo was dubbed a “tiny monstrosity.” More recently, biologists have seen many examples of two-headed creatures in their labs. Using modern genetics, scholars have come to understand the mutations and cellular displacements that might allow for this phenomenon, and similar ancient cases could have led to the creation of the original myths. Ancient storytellers may have seen such abnormalities, and incorporated them into their tales.

Two-headed, and even three-headed, animals are occasionally found in the wild. The phenomenon, named polycephaly, is not limited to any one class of animals. In recent years, a two-headed bull shark fetus was found in the Gulf of Mexico, and a double-headed dolphin washed up on a Turkish beach. Both are instances of conjoined twins—offspring that develop from an egg that fails to separate after fertilization. Such offspring will often have twin sets of some internal organs and even limbs.

The list of many-headed creatures dates back millions of years. It includes not only snakes, turtles, and kittens, but those ancient monsters that paleontologists have discovered in the fossil record. Evolutionists reckon there are a number of mechanisms that can mean more than one head or face. Heads are an example of convergent evolution. They evolve separately in different groups of species. Heads just seem to be useful adaptations that can arise in a wide range of creatures. And that’s why so many sense organs, such as eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, are also found there.

Sonic Hedgehog Gene!

The root of the many-headed phenomenon is at the genetic level. One gene that has a big influence, especially on the width of the face, is pleasingly named “Sonic Hedgehog,” or SHH. The name is a result of a set of hedgehog (HH) genes, which mutate to make fruit flies born with spiky hair-like structures—that look a little like teeny hedgehogs.

Vertebrates have the Sonic gene. And if the SHH signal is increased during embryonic development, weird things can happen. The head can broaden so much; you get two faces rather than one. We’re some way to producing a Fluffy, but not all the way there. The Sonic gene only results in a many-faced, not many-headed specimen. For a totally separate neck and head growing from a single body, a group of cells, known as an organizer, in the early embryo would have to be invoked. Scholars are beginning to understand why such abnormal steps in development happen. And one crucial factor appears to be temperature. For example, one biologist found that higher water temperatures resulted in the development of a two-headed zebrafish embryo.

Nature may well have inspired fantasy, but the reverse is also true—fantasy has inspired science. The ancient myth about Heracles inspired Swedish zoologist, Carl Linnaeus, to name a genus of simple freshwater animals, Hydra. This group of tiny aquatic animals, found by Linnaeus in 1758, are particularly fascinating, as they have many snake-like appendages and even the ability to regenerate like the Hydra in the myth.

Muggles are psychologically prone to be unsettled by natural abnormality. Such reactions help explain why deformity made Fluffy such a frightful creature. Indeed, the description of the two-headed pipefish embryo as a “tiny monstrosity” also serves to show the human discomfort at polycephaly. And that means that Fluffy is far from being the only many-headed monster in human mythology. There is an ancient Japanese myth, yamata no orochi, which tells of an eight-headed snake. A Slavic myth, zmey gorynych, speaks of a three-headed dragon. And, of course, another beast Heracles had to labor against was the many-headed dog Cerberus.

So, in many ways, evolution has already made its own Fluffy. Science still has much to discover about polycephaly in our planet’s many creatures. But given the low survival rate of many-headed organisms, both in the wild and in captivity, the trait is likely to remain an extraordinary and unsettling sight for muggles everywhere. Such creatures represent many challenges in one, an adversary that cannot be easily defeated. And the whole creature culture of such multi-headed monsters is likely to have a long life, unlike polycephalic creatures in the wild.