The evolution of pizza

I know, I am supposed to write about the weird and quirky side of economics and finance on Fridays, but while browsing the Annals of Improbable Research I came across the below biological ‘study’ that I just cannot not share:

The Evolution of Pizza – Novel insights into the fourth domain of life

by Russ Hodge Pablo Mier Munoz and Miguel Andrade-Navarro

This study attempts to deliver pizza into a proper—and more widely appreciated—place in the field of biology.

Methods and Results

We visited approximately 100 different Italian restaurants in a sample of no less than five European countries over a period of 4 years (extrapolated from social media statistics of the authors: FourSquare, Google Location History, etc.) to gather the names and ingredients present in a total of 58 different pizzas. While we did not taste them all, we can attest that none are venomous, and that their organoleptic qualities can therefore be successfully transmitted mouth-to-mouth to the next generation of diners. The ingredients were clustered in 9 groups according to their origins and use in cuisine (Table 1).

Tomato sauce and mozzarella form their own groups, as these are not considered ingredients but rather inherent components of the pizza (Combet et al., 2014).

The pineapple was set apart in a group by itself as an obvious aberration, due to the fact that it is universally recognized as a dysfunctional mutation that arises from a hybridization event (somewhat like the mule) and cannot produce viable offspring.

It is notable that not a single pizza contains more than three ingredients from the same group, which hints that they cause some sort of synthetic lethality, or have effects resembling the acquisition of excess chromosomes.

The pizzas were scored by counting the number of ingredients they contained per group. Exceptions are the tomato sauce and mozzarella, which were each weighted as three (rather than one) ingredients, due to their importance in the general composition of pizza. The data was analyzed using the R programming language and Rstudio, clustering the pizzas based on their ingredients. The result was plotted in a clustered heatmap using the pheatmap R package (Kolde, 2015).

Tomato sauce and mozzarella are the key components in the pizza and serve as classifiers (Figure 1). Ingredients from the meat/eggs and/or vegetables groups are often used as the toppings to go together with the main components of the pizzas.

Conclusions

Our investigation provides the first account of the evolutionary route by which modern species of pizza diverged from an ancient, ancestral form. We characterize the last common ancestor as sharing the three-layer structure of modern pizzas, which resembles the first stage of animal gastrulation. In contrast to animals, however, pizza got stuck there, and never added additional developmental stages.

It is interesting to speculate what might have happened if instead of flattening, dough had retained its original, ball-shaped form, and built layers of sauce and cheese inside. Pizza calzone, a modern species, obtains this type of structure by folding the membranous dough around to seal off the interior, but this is the very last stage in its embryonic development. If, in the distant past, this progression had advanced to the beginning of embryogenesis, pizzas might have followed an evolutionary path much more like our own. Potentially this could have made pizza, rather than humans, the preeminent form of intelligent life in the known universe.

Thinkers such as Richard Dawkins see the evolutionary value of intelligence in its promotion of the survival and reproduction of a species’ genes. Pizza found an alternative by entering into its dependency on humans, who gladly overtook measures to ensure its reproduction, which likely led to the creation of new social structures. The increase of this dependency over time ultimately restricted the evolution of pizza to the path that has produced the species we know today. But this notion is somewhat speculative.

Preliminary data suggest that it may be possible to push the knowable ancestry of pizza back even farther, to a point at which the last common ancestor diverged from other organisms such as crêpes, pancakes and burritos. We are currently digesting the data from that investigation, and anticipate publishing the results at a later date.

Enjoy the full note here.