Life itself

Evolution's requisite forces & mechanisms are typically described as 1) selective pressure upon populations 2) discrete genetic inheritance and 3) genetic mutation and recombination.

This list falls far short, and will be looked at as inadequate, by evolutionary biologists in the late 21st century.

Number 1 on the list should probably be life itself: a reliable ontogeny, or morphological unfolding, based upon differentiating steps under the guidance of genetic information. This would not take place without the power of a stunningly robust, coherent developmental physiology, which essentially always creates a functioning life.

Life's doggedness is quite tangible, yet the nature of its force & robustness is still a mystery. The issue is so overarching as to be barely ever mentioned, except by specialists working on the origins of life, and then only occasionally. Without this force of life, natural selection could not take place, genetic information would have nothing to guide, and genetic mutation & recombination would be moot.

I believe there's some scientific cultural artifact that makes discussion of a life force somehow sound religious. I'm not religious, but I'm given funny looks when I say "life force". One of the most basic biological facts is regularly ignored by the scientific establishment, much to the impoverishment of scientific discussion. I suppose since it is not patentable, it is ignored in these times of fame & fortune. It's the elephant at the dinner table.

Power, profit, evolution

The new political power, and the new marketing power, of anti-evolutionary punditry has burst into the US media lately. Although the scientific community is perfectly capable of arguing for common sense, I believe they don't really understand who they are arguing with. Scientists seem to think they're arguing with 'religious nuts'. It's not true. They are arguing with hired guns from the marketing & public relations industry.

The majority of people in the country do not give a whoop about this battle. Nor do the majority of very religious people. Religion is being used in a media war for certain power interests.

Why? Ever since the 60's, when 'people power' began to really topple 'elite power', there has been a massive reaction in the halls of power. The elite have used every means at their disposal -- publicity, religion, covert action and massive violence -- to push the world as far away from democracy as possible. Seizing religion is a major item on their agenda, because reactionary religious policy is superb for keeping people complacent about the real world.

To conquer the 'religious market', the elites picked battles on inconsequential ideological fronts. Note that they never quote the bible and work to eliminate hypocrisy, greed, poverty, etc. They are rich as croesus, and they don't want anyone to know it. Instead, they'll concentrate on schoolteachers, the terminally ill, and poor pregnant women. Easy targets that keep pro-democracy organizers on their toes.

Why are they against democracy? Because it cuts into their profits, by definition. If everyone had equal political power, they would have relatively equal financial power. Which means that it would be difficult to pay people minimum wage, and fire them at will, when you're making record profit. We saw this a bit in the Internet boom, when employees had employers over a barrel, and so workers were getting unprecedented stock options. This, by itself, made those in power work to prick the Internet bubble as soon as possible.

The role of science is to serve profit. When it does not serve those interests, or works against them, scientists have a battle on their hands. In this case, they need to form coalition with other workers, not against religion. It's a giant social chasm to cross, because of science's role as courtier to power. But it's getting increasingly critical to stop arguing with power, and start forming a popular constituency for equality & common sense.

The other way around

I remember a scary building, long since demolished, in the sciences complex at the University of Oregon in Eugene. This must have been the late 1970's -- I had a key to most of the science buildings, and would explore the nooks and crannys in my off hours, to clear my head. The scary one had a "danger: radiation" sign on almost every door from the outside all the way through to the bathroom. It was filled with sinks and tables labeled as badly irradiated.

This was a biology laboratory. What on earth was all this unnatural radiation for? What did it have to do with biology? The answer, as it turns out, is "nothing".

These labs were for drosophila research. Generations of fruit flies were bred with different levels of background radiation in order to 1) quantify the genetic damage of different levels of radiation and 2) track the cross-bred journey of mutations over generations.

Although much was learned about the structure of the genetic transmission, the impetus for the research was a theory, which in my mind is now discredited: that genetic variation emerges through radiation-induced genetic mutation. This was, with hindsight, a convenient interpretation of Darwinism in the Age of the Atom. In much the same way, "Social Darwinism", preaching survival of the strong, was a convenient interpretation of Darwin in the age of Robber Barons.

The notion that "hopeful monsters" would provide the necessary variation, flew in the face of this basic observation: living things tend to be quite healthy, but genetic damage tends to kill.

I saw the answer to this problem presented quite clearly, although not generalized, on a NOVA the other day, about dogs. Dogs under selective pressures, for example "friendliness towards humans", undergo changes in metabolic and hormonal pathways, and developmental timing, which radically change their morphology. [From experiments by Dmitri Belyaev]

Morphological evolution is the direct result of selective pressures. It doesn't require a separate "mechanism", such as random mutation introduced by environmental radiation, acted upon by selection. The pressure creates the evolution.

As is often the case, our cognition tends to "separate" aspects of nature before recognizing that ... they are not separate.

Note that much of genetic programming is based on this superceded notion of random mutation. It may need to evolve to the new model, if the goal is to achieve levels of adaptation equivalent to nature's.