Week Two: Evolutionary and Developmental Biology

My thoughts on Evo-Devo and how Darwinism matters to me... (This is a pretty long post. I apologize. The topic made me a little obsessive and I had trouble stopping and went contrary to my better judgment.)

We live by story. And the story we are living by is driving our species to extinction. It is that the story we live by is shaped by the prevailing theory of who we are, what we are here for and where we are going. Thus if we change the theory, we can change the story, and thus the old pattern of our lives, opening the way to the better world.

-- David Loye


Theories of how we came to be here, right here, right now, and where we are going, are all stories. You have the Darwinists, the Creationists, the Neo-Darwinists, the Evolutionary Developmental Biologists...and the lay person, who may or may not consider the question at all.

Charles Darwin:


From a personal standpoint, my own biology and evolution is a mystery to me. From my heart, I can only thank my parents and my ancestors for surviving and reproducing. I feel like a biological concoction and continuation of their lives. I am the result -- as are my sisters and parents and cousins and aunts and uncles -- of a long chain of a family of survivors.

How did I get to this current point and am I appropriately adapted to my environment? Perhaps not -- I don’t have any children. Is reproduction essential to being considered successful in an evolutionary sense? Maybe on an individual level but at the level of the collective, perhaps *not* reproducing is even more essential to the survival of humanity (and the rest of the planet) at this point.

What I can say with certainty is that I don’t feel that my current environment is a very good match for my biology, and vice versa. The noisy world raises my cortisol levels and it frequently doesn’t make me feel good. Does happiness play a part in “evolutionary success”? I am attempting to go beyond my body’s dislike of crowds, noise, garbage, and bad manners through the use of culturally learned behaviors like meditation and energy work, etc., to adapt better to my environment. Other people are using a lot of drugs to ward off the onslaught of overwhelming sensory input. From the looks of our drug sales, particularly antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, a lot of people are feeling they need some help, beyond what our biology offers, to adapt better to this crazy environment we have created.

In the early nineties as an anthropology student I received some good basic training in theories of evolution and genetics. What was presented was rather simple and straightforward and made sense--genes are passed down, and if they are suitable for the environment at hand you reproduce, passing those “fit” genes along. Occasionally mutations happen, randomly, creating variations. The story was that the environment drives biology. In recent years I have come to think that “evolution” is more complicated than what I had been taught.

The mapping of the genome produced surprising findings. There are fewer genes controlling our biology than we expected. Variations in the genetic makeup between species are smaller than what we assumed we would find. And there are holes in the paleontological record -- there are “missing links” and much is unexplained.

The evo-devo people discovered, through looking at DNA on the molecular level, that genes between species are not all that different, but they express themselves differently.

This New York Times snippet was a good basic summary of what exactly evolutionary developmental biology is:

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=3ba8ecaed1cf130c1d0ea4baa3876356bea3bb58

Motivations for studying evolution have varied, but hopefully it will ultimately lead us to “finding our place” as Dr. Sean Carroll states in the New York Times video. And that, I think, is what the intense arguments regarding the genesis of life have been about. There is profound disagreement as to where the human place is. Above nature? A part of nature? At the “top” of the food chain? Better than the rest? Smarter?

I tend to think that the revolutionary thinkers on the subject have it right (please see below) -- it seems everything is pointing to the fact that we are interconnected with the planet as a living being, and all life on the planet is really not that much different, in essence, from other life forms...in other words, we are all one (the same thing that physics says). The hard part is getting mentally beyond these isolated bodies and seeing things within a deeper context and history. I also think the earth is trying to evolve with us, and trying to adapt to the changing circumstances of what the conditions of the planet have become. She (the earth) might feel the need for some antidepressants right now, too. And I think she's a little crabby -- hence all the tsunamis, earthquakes and such.

In the last thirty years or so there have been other revolutionary thinkers on the subject of evolution. There has also been a re-looking at what Darwin actually said. Here are some interesting thoughts and thinkers on the subject:

1. David Loye



At 83-years-old David Loye has had a wide ranging background, from being in the trenches of WW II to spending ten years on the faculties of Princeton and the UCLA School of Medicine. In later life, his thoughts turned to Darwin and evolutionary theory. He went back and re-read Darwin and made some surprising discoveries. He now believes that Darwinists and Neo-Darwinists have misinterpreted Darwin. His claim is that Darwin believed what primarily drives human evolution are "the moral qualities." And that the moral qualities are “advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, by our reasoning powers, by instruction, by religion, etc., than through natural selection.”

In the Descent of Man he searched for the following terms, to see how prominent they are in Darwin’s thinking.

Survival of the fittest = used 2 times in Descent
Competition = 9 times
Selfish and selfishness = 12 times

Love = 95 times
Moral sensitivity and morality = 92
Sympathy = 61
Mutual, mutuality, mutual aid = 24

Loye also writes that "The shift from the emphasis for the first half [The Origin of Species] to the full Darwinian theory [The Descent of Man] and story [Darwin's journals] — and your understanding and involvement — can not only help move us toward the better future. In the long run, it may help save ours and all other species."

Link to Loye’s work: http://thedarwinproject.com/about/about.html

2. Rupert Sheldrake, a controversial figure in science and former biochemist trained at Cambridge and Harvard, has presented the theory of “morphic resonance” to explain how genes could be so similar amongst species, but the expression of those genes so diverse (for example, the genes dictating the spots on a moth are basically the same as the genes dictating a mammal's limbs). Morphic Resonance is like a cloud of memory that exists around individuals, societies, cultures and species, that carries memory which informs everything from the shape of a limb to societal behavior patterns. This morphic resonance also evolves, and it carries with it much more of the story than just our genes do.

Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic fields:

http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/morphic/morphic_intro.html



3. Lynn Margulis, a microbiologist and partner with James Lovelock in creating the “Gaia Theory,” revolutionized evolutionary thinking with her theory that symbiotic relationships--a co-evolution with the planet and other life forms -- are what have been the determining factors in the evolution of species. This is systems thinking. Margulis has found that significant portions of the human genome are either bacterial or viral in origin. Bacteria evolves very differently from other life forms, as they can share DNA during their lifetimes with other bacteria. Some of our human DNA does not reside in the cell nucleus, but outside of it -- this is the mitochondrial DNA. It is theorized that this mitochondrial DNA resulted from viruses that have become a permanent part of our DNA. The advent of microbiology greatly changed the view of evolution. According to Margulis, many scientists still approach evolution at a macro level, leading to great misunderstanding. From her Wikipedia entry:

“She also believes that proponents of the standard theory "wallow in their zoological, capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit interpretation of Darwin - having mistaken him... Neo-Darwinism, which insists on (the slow accrual of mutations by gene-level natural selection), is a complete funk." She opposes such competition-oriented views of evolution, stressing the importance of symbiotic or cooperative relationships between species.”

Links about Margulis:



http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/margulis/

4. And finally Fritjof Capra sums up much of this systems-based evolutionary thinking in his 1996 book “The Web of Life.” He reviews Darwinists, Neo-Darwinists, Margulis and Lovelock, deep time, findings from microbiology, and then moves into evolution and human culture. In the end Capra writes "that a proper understanding of human evolution is impossible without understanding the evolution of language, art, and culture. In other words, we must now turn our attention to mind and consciousness, the third conceptual dimension of the systems view of life.”



Comments on the links:

Darwin's books are like the Bible -- many interpretations are possible. Though they definitely answer one question -- life forms have changed over time -- the exact path and way that happens is up for discussion. Depending on one's world view -- scientific, religious, or somewhere in between -- arguments can be constructed to support that world view. It's slightly troubling how so many different people can be so sure that they have the right answer as to what this all means. And kind of laughable that the mystery remains! The mystery remains! Buddhists will tell you you have to find the answers out for yourself and be your own teacher. I just cross my fingers and hope we can get ourselves to a place of greater peace and happiness, personally and collectively.