Posted on 02/03/2005 2:07:26 PM PST by Michael_Michaelangelo
Freeman Dyson is professor emeritus of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. His research has focused on the internal physics of stars, subatomic-particle beams, and the origin of life.
Carl Woese published a provocative and illuminating article, “A New Biology for a New Century,” in the June 2004 issue of Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews. His main theme is the obsolescence of reductionist biology as it has been practiced for the last hundred years, and the need for a new biology based on communities and ecosystems rather than on genes and molecules. He also raises another profoundly important question: when did Darwinian evolution begin? By Darwinian evolution he means evolution as Darwin himself understood it, based on the intense competition for survival among noninterbreeding species. He presents evidence that Darwinian evolution did not go back to the beginning of life. In early times, the process that he calls “horizontal gene transfer,” the sharing of genes between unrelated species, was prevalent. It becomes more prevalent the further back you go in time. Carl Woese is the world’s greatest expert in the field of microbial taxonomy. Whatever he writes, even in a speculative vein, is to be taken seriously.
Woese is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, during which horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species. With its superior efficiency, it continued to prosper and to evolve separately. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became another species. And so it went on, until all life was divided into species.
The basic biochemical machinery of life evolved rapidly during the few hundred million years that preceded the Darwinian era and changed very little in the following two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established, evolve very little. Darwinian evolution requires species to become extinct so that new species can replace them. Three innovations helped to speed up the pace of evolution in the later stages of the Darwinian era. The first was sex, which is a form of horizontal gene transfer within species. The second innovation was multicellular organization, which opened up a whole new world of form and function. The third was brains, which opened a new world of coördinated sensation and action, culminating in the evolution of eyes and hands. All through the Darwinian era, occasional mass extinctions helped to open opportunities for new evolutionary ventures.
Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over. The epoch of species competition came to an end about 10 thousand years ago when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence that we call globalization. And now, in the last 30 years, Homo sapiens has revived the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, and the evolution of life will again be communal.
In the post-Darwinian era, biotechnology will be domesticated. There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners, who will use gene transfer to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also, biotech games for children, played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of the general public, will give us an explosion of biodiversity. Designing genomes will be a new art form, as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but all will bring joy to their creators and diversity to our fauna and flora.
ping
Freeman Dyson ... didn't he help build Skynet?
Whereas the objective should be a search for the truth, we get instead another patch for the rotting darwinian rubber inner tube.
ROFL. So this will be the next sorry excuse for evolution? "Well, evolution wasn't happening in the beginning, and we don't have evolution now, but for awhile there we sure did! And if you don't believe it, why, you're just a crazy nut!"
If all the darwinist responses on all the c/e threads could be compressed into one paragraph, that would be it.
Is that an empty can of primordial soup I see there? :)
It's all the great evolutionary predictions of the past 150 years.
Microbiol Mol Biol Rev. 2004 Jun;68(2):173-86.
A new biology for a new century.
Woese CR.
Department of Microbiology, University of Illinois, 601 S. Goodwin, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. carl@ninja.life.uiuc.edu
Biology today is at a crossroads. The molecular paradigm, which so successfully guided the discipline throughout most of the 20th century, is no longer a reliable guide. Its vision of biology now realized, the molecular paradigm has run its course. Biology, therefore, has a choice to make, between the comfortable path of continuing to follow molecular biology's lead or the more invigorating one of seeking a new and inspiring vision of the living world, one that addresses the major problems in biology that 20th century biology, molecular biology, could not handle and, so, avoided. The former course, though highly productive, is certain to turn biology into an engineering discipline. The latter holds the promise of making biology an even more fundamental science, one that, along with physics, probes and defines the nature of reality. This is a choice between a biology that solely does society's bidding and a biology that is society's teacher.
FRegards, MM
The 19th century as a whole had a reductionistic world view, if for no other reason than because of the outlook of classical physics. Physics at that time saw a fundamentally reductionistic world, in which ultimate explanation lay completely in the properties and interactions of atoms: to know the positions and momenta of all of the fundamental particles at a given point in time was in principle to know their positions and momenta at any other point in time, past or future. Nothing added, nothing subtracted; just the endless deterministic jumble of bouncing atomic balls in a directionless time (33). Biologists of the 19th century were no exception to the reductionist zeitgeist, but theirs tended to be an empirical, analytical reductionism, not a metaphysical one: one would be hard put to explain evolution and the problem of biological form in reductionist terms alone.Given the temper of the times, the entry of chemistry and physics into biology was inevitable. The technology that these sciences would introduce was not only welcome but very much needed. Also, biology was now well enough scientifically understood that it began to appeal to physicists. But the physics and chemistry that entered biology (especially the former) was a Trojan horse, something that would ultimately conquer biology from within and remake it in its own image. Biology would be totally fissioned, and its holistic side would be quashed. Biology would quickly become a science of lesser importance, for it had nothing fundamental to tell us about the world. Physics provided the ultimate explanations. Biology, as no more than complicated chemistry, was at the end of the line, merely providing baroque ornamentation on the great edifice of understanding that was physics—the hierarchy physics chemistrybiology is burned into the thinking of all scientists, a pecking order that has done much to foster in society the (mistaken) notion that biology is only an applied science.
In the last several decades we have seen the molecular reductionist reformulation of biology grind to a halt, its vision of the future spent, leaving us with only a gigantic whirring biotechnology machine. Biology today is little more than an engineering discipline. Thus, biology is at the point where it must choose between two paths: either continue on its current track, in which case it will become mired in the present, in application, or break free of reductionist hegemony, reintegrate itself, and press forward once more as a fundamental science. The latter course means an emphasis on holistic, "nonlinear," emergent biology—with understanding evolution and the nature of biological form as the primary, defining goals of a new biology.
Society cannot tolerate a biology whose metaphysical base is outmoded and misleading: the society desperately needs to live in harmony with the rest of the living world, not with a biology that is a distorted and incomplete reflection of that world. Because it has been taught to accept the above hierarchy of the sciences, society today perceives biology as here to solve its problems, to change the living world. Society needs to appreciate that the real relationship between biology and the physical sciences is not hierarchical, but reciprocal: physicsbiology. Both physics and biology are primary windows on the world; they see the same gem but different facets thereof (and so inform one another). Knowing this, society will come to see that biology is here to understand the world, not primarily to change it. Biology's primary job is to teach us. In that realization lies our hope of learning to live in harmony with our planet.
"Freeman Dyson: noted Creationist whackjob"
What someone will inevitably say or post here in the next few minutes....(toe tapping).
He cites Woese's article in this context:
It is easiest to think of synthesis of the first simple peptides as taking place independently of coding, giving rise to a comparatively limited number of short peptides of fixed or even random sequence. Specification of amino acids by RNA sequences most likely emerged later, requiring coevolution of the ribosome and its tRNAs (Noller 1993; Schimmel and Henderson 1994) ultimately leading to our present, protein-dominated form of biology. Most difficult to explain is this final phase of evolution of the ribosome, the emergence of coding, which gave rise to "one of the great evolutionary saltations...that would generate a truly enormous new, totally unique evolutionary phase space" (Woese 2004).
Noller's abstract is:
It is widely argued that protein synthesis evolved out of an RNA world, in which catalytic and other biological functions now carried out by proteins were performed by RNAs. However, it is not clear what selective advantage would have provided the driving force for evolution of a primitive translation apparatus, because of the unlikelihood that rudimentary polypeptides would have contributed sufficiently useful biological functions. Here, I suggest that the availability of even simple peptides could have significantly enlarged the otherwise limited structure space of RNA. In other words, translation initially evolved not to create a protein world, but to extend the structural, and therefore the functional, capabilities of the RNA world. Observed examples of substantial structural rearrangements in RNA that are induced by binding of peptides and other small molecules support this possibility.
There is hope. Some of these guys are thinking outside of the box. Refreshing, thanks.
Thanks for the ping MM!
"Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them."
Why, oh why does this sound so much like a biological argument for Communism?
This argument makes no logical sense. You may be able to make the case that human beings are no longer undergoing biological evolution because we are making a conscious effort to preserve weaker members of the species, but you can hardly claim the same thing for fish. The same evolutionary forces that worked on them for 10 million years are still working on them today, and we should be still seeing a certain percentage of species, genus, class, order, family, etc. formation within the biosphere at any given moment in time.
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