A living biologist more important than Darwin?
by: Dave Belden on February 2nd, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Carl Woese
You might think, on this site, that I would be talking up a sacred biologist, someone who combines a spiritual worldview with strong scientific credibility, but I don’t know too many of those (Francis Collins is one). I look forward to seeing more come out of the woodwork as this century progresses. This purely scientific story, though, does have spiritual implications for us. It tells us that the whole biosphere is much more interconnected at the DNA level than biologists including Darwin previously thought. I’m throwing in a related story about our human DNA, which it turns out isn’t so simply human after. First the “more important than Darwin” biologist:
JUST suppose that Darwin’s ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth’s history. It may sound preposterous, but this is exactly what microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe. Darwin’s explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth.
At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer — in which organisms acquire genetic material “horizontally” from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species. This mechanism is already known to play a huge role in the evolution of microbial genomes, but its consequences have hardly been explored. According to Woese and Goldenfeld, they are profound, and horizontal gene transfer alters the evolutionary process itself. Since micro-organisms represented most of life on Earth for most of the time that life has existed — billions of years, in fact – the most ancient and prevalent form of evolution probably wasn’t Darwinian at all, Woese and Goldenfeld say.
A fascinating article, and it leads the author to this conclusion:
No doubt there will be resistance in some quarters, yet many biologists recognise that there must be a change in thinking if evolution is finally to be understood in a deep way. “The microbial world holds the greatest biomass on Earth,” says Sapp, “but for most evolutionists it’s a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. They tend to focus on visible plants and animals.”
If a paradigm shift is pending, Pace says it will be in good hands. “I think Woese has done more for biology writ large than any biologist in history, including Darwin,” he says. “There’s a lot more to learn, and he’s been interpreting the emerging story brilliantly.”
“I Virus, Why You’re Only Half Human”
That’s the sensationalistic title of the other story.
WHEN, in 2001, the human genome was sequenced for the first time, we were confronted by several surprises. One was the sheer lack of genes: where we had anticipated perhaps 100,000 there were actually as few as 20,000. A bigger surprise came from analysis of the genetic sequences, which revealed that these genes made up a mere 1.5 per cent of the genome. This is dwarfed by DNA deriving from viruses, which amounts to roughly 9 per cent.
On top of that, huge chunks of the genome are made up of mysterious virus-like entities called retrotransposons, pieces of selfish DNA that appear to serve no function other than to make copies of themselves. These account for no less than 34 per cent of our genome.
All in all, the virus-like components of the human genome amount to almost half of our DNA. This would once have been dismissed as mere “junk DNA”, but we now know that some of it plays a critical role in our biology. As to the origins and function of the rest, we simply do not know.
So we don’t know what most of our DNA is for just as we don’t know what most of the universe is made of. (In case you’re not up on that one, “Recent observations of supernovae are consistent with a universe made up 71.3% of dark energy and 27.4% of a combination of dark matter and baryonic matter” as Wikipedia puts it). The more we know the more we find out we don’t know.
However much you hate the way science is made into a religion (as if the scientific was the only real route to knowledge), you gotta love this about science: what other major world system of thought trumpets its ignorance so strongly? Oh, apart from all the mystics of the world, that is. Socrates, I recall, had something to say about this too.
So the spiritual implications for us? You can take different lessons from it about how the world is. For example, as I understand that article, most of the virus DNA got into our DNA as we co-evolved (humans and viruses) after plague viruses attacked us. This viral DNA is
believed to be the legacy of epidemics throughout our evolutionary history. We might pause to consider that we are the descendants of the survivors of a harrowing, if brutally creative, series of viral epidemics.
More news about how fierce, mean and ruthless nature is. Call in Dick Cheney.
But we can also contemplate the fact of all this horizontal gene-swapping and consider how astonishingly interconnected that makes the whole biosphere. Much, much more so than we learned in biology class. Call in the Dalai Lama. Aung San Suu Kyi. Nelson Mandela. Gandhi. MLK. Wangari Maathai.
Life–I was going to say “the spiritual life” but I just mean “life”–involves getting a clear and realistic read on the world (without succumbing to the bias in that word “realistic” which generally means the worst take), but it then requires some choices: whether to go with a fear-based, combative response to this complex world, or an empathic, open, hope-seeking response. It seems that more and more of modern biology is prompting us towards the latter. The biosphere doesn’t have to be overwhelmingly co-operative and interdependent for us to choose to be so: we could so choose even if it were the ruthless struggle of all against all that has so often been erroneously dubbed “Darwinian.” But it sure helps if nature is at the interdependent end of the spectrum. It makes Dick Cheney look even more like the frightened marginal type in the biosphere that he is. If we follow him and his kind, and the Cheneyish impulses inside all of us, we will be out of sync with reality as well as out of sync with spiritual imperatives.
By the way, both those stories come from the New Scientist website. If you want to read them, do so before you start trolling the site, because you are only allowed to read six articles before they close it off to you and ask for a subscription. My wife and I are always trying to cut costs and every year the question of my expensive subscription to New Scientist comes up, and every year I ditch all other magazines and keep that one. I reckon it’s useful for someone who had zero science education (the British school system specialized us from about age 12 and I went the history/Latin/English route, so after a pathetic general science course at age 14, which basically explained why you don’t want to drop a thermos, I never had a science class again right up to Sociology PhD level). Useful to keep abreast of this barely regulated force that’s driving our world in so many ways (regulated, if that’s the word, more and more by the power of commercial interests, rather than by ethical considerations and spiritually mature priorities).
Dave, I love the _New Scientist_, too. I never have enough time to read everything in it that I’d like to, but sometimes Mark keeps me abreast of the breaking news. He had told me about both of these stories, knowing that I — like he — acknowledge “the interdependent web of all existence,” as the Unitarian Universalist 7th principle states. And knowing that as a witch, I experience that interconnection as a part of my religion.
I want him to write to you, as well, because we have a good friend who is a professor of soil science, who has been talking to us about how the microbes in the soil have influenced the evolution of life on earth (but since he’s the scientist, he’ll remember more of what she told us). I find all of this totally fascinating and love, as you point out, what appear to be the spiritual imperatives of the interconnections scientists keep finding.
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A couple of points from another NS subscriber (who did the first year of the coursework for “A” Level Chemistry, Biology, and Maths and then dropped and switched to English, History, and Art):
–First: Carl Woese is indeed a very great biologist. He discovered an entire order of organisms, the Archaea, single-celled creatures whose reign on earth preceded that of modern bacteria and then eukaryotes (nucleated-cell organisms, from amoebas to humans). From the work of Lyn Margulis and others we have learned that these creatures were hugely cooperative, forming vast systems in which they passed around not only genes but chemicals they needed for life.
That said, I think it’s a bit silly to compare Woese favorably to Darwin. As Ernst Mayr points out, Darwin’s work–centrally, the theory of natural selection–is the foundation of modern biology, which before Darwin was “natural history,” a collection of facts about organisms linked by a heavily speculative taxonomy. Darwin, as has often been remarked, therefore occupies a place in biology equivalent to that held by Isaac Newton in physics and astronomy. This role is only open once in the history of a science (though, as in the case of Darwin and Wallace, it may be occupied by more than one person). Woese’s discoveries are tremendous, but they are only one (important) part of a rapidly developing accumulation of discoveries in biology that are recontextualizing natural selection as part of a larger whole–a useful approximation at certain scales and during a certain phase in evolution, which also occurs by other mechanisms. This is much like what happened to Newtonian mechanics in the wake of relativity and quantum theory.
–Second: as Stephen Jay Gould points in *The Panda’s Thumb*, it’s meaningless to apply human moral adjectives like “fierce, mean, and ruthless” to “nature.” One can observe basic communal ethics in large-brained mammals such as apes and dolphins, which do appear to make choices about such things. But the overwhelming majority of organisms are not equipped, so far as we can tell, to do this, whether they cooperate, compete, or both. “Nature” (the biosphere, or for that matter, a physical universe in which galaxies collide, stars explode, and asteroid impacts destroy entire orders of species, like the dinosaurs) is neither cruel nor kind. It is, to cite the cliche, what it is. Cooperation and competition between and within species and biological communities are both evolved “strategies” for survival.
So-called evolutionary psychology to the contrary, though, humans *are* capable of moral choice, not only with respect to members of our own species, but with respect to others. Indeed, the mere fact that we find it so difficult to speak of nonhuman nature without such anthropomorphism shows that such ethical abilities–however much they may be dishonored, distorted, or ignored by individuals or groups–are central to who we are as a species. I agree that the discoveries of modern biology make us realize how interconnected we are with the rest of the biosphere. That is exactly what made Darwin dangerous to anthropocentric creation narratives: he showed us that we are animals, far more like other animals than we are different. And that is also exactly why coal and oil companies get on so well with Christian fundamentalists, and why so many fundies are climate-change and ecocide denialists. They share an underlying anthropocentric, human-centric ethos and a self-delusive belief in the inexhaustibility of the “natural resources” (other living beings) over whom “God” supposedly gave humans dominion.