"By the time he was 45, cardiologist Mark Keating had reached the pinnacle of a doctor's career. He was preparing to move from his prestigious post as an investigator at the University of Utah to an even more exalted position as a professor at Harvard. He'd just won three important prizes for his comprehensive work on the genetics of heart arrhythmias. He seemed destined for even more glory in the field of cardiac genetics.

But oddly, Keating couldn't keep his mind off newts. He was particularly obsessed with an obscure species native to East Coast forests: a bandy-legged amphibian with a flat tail, blunt head, and vivid crimson dots. Red-spotted newts are endangered, but that wasn't what lured Keating away from his heart patients. Rather, newts' famous ability to heal themselves fascinated him - they can produce a new eye or sprout a leg if one is amputated, even reconnect a severed spinal cord. "

] Why? It's an evolutionary mystery. The ability to regrow
] legs and eyes seems like a clear Darwinian advantage -
] one that surviving generations would have retained. But a
] paradox of regeneration is that the higher you move up
] the evolutionary chain, the less likely you'll have the
] ability to regrow limbs or organs. Keating's mission:
] figure out the cause of this paradox - and reverse it.

I wonder if giving the cells in a complex organism this kind of regenerative power makes them more likely to become cancerous, and so complex organisms with this feature died out from that.

U: This is what I get for not finishing the article before memeing... They discuss this possibility...

] Why? It's an evolutionary mystery. The ability to regrow
] legs and eyes seems like a clear Darwinian advantage -
] one that surviving generations would have retained. But a
] paradox of regeneration is that the higher you move up
] the evolutionary chain, the less likely you'll have the
] ability to regrow limbs or organs. Keating's mission:
] figure out the cause of this paradox - and reverse it.