I am interested in reading on a fairly specific topic, and I would like suggestions. I don't know any way to describe this other than be giving the two examples I have thought of:

Some time ago my family and I visited India. There, among other things, we saw many cows with an extra, useless leg growing out of their backs near the shoulders. This mutation is presumably not beneficial to the cow, but it strikes me as beneficial to the amateur geneticist. Isn't it incredibly interesting that a leg can be the by-product of random mutation? Doesn't that tell us a lot about the way genes are structured - namely that somewhere out there is a gene that encodes things at near the level of genes - some small number of genes corresponds nearly directly to major, structural components of the cow. It's not all about molecules, or cells, or even tissues! Gene's aren't like a bitmap image - they're hierarchical and structured. Wow!

Similarly, there are stories of people losing specific memory 'segments', say, their personal past but not how to read and write, how to drive, or how to talk. Assuming that these stories are approximately true, that suggests that some forms of memory loss are not random. We wouldn't expect a hard drive error to corrupt only pictures of sunny days on your computer since the hard drive doesn't know what pictures are of sunny days. We wouldn't even expect a computer virus to do that. At least we wouldn't unless somewhere the pictures of sunny days are grouped together, say in a folder. So the brain doesn't store memories like a computer stores images! Or memory loss isn't like hard drive failures! Somewhere, memories are 'clumped' into personal-things and general-knowledge things so that we can lose one without losing the other and without an unfathomable coincidence of chance.

Neither of these conclusions is either specific or surprising, but I know nothing about neurology and nothing about genetics so I'm not sure how to take these ideas further than my poor computer science-driven analogies. If someone who really knew this subject, or some subset of it, wrote about it, I can't help but feeling that this would be absolutely fascinating. Please, let me know if there is such a book or article or blog post out there! Or even if you just have other observations that'll make me think "wow" like this, tell me!