The Plausibility of Life

When creationists, or, as they would have it, advocates of "intelligent design," talk about the "weaknesses" of evolutionary theory, knowledgeable people generally roll their eyes and ignore them. This is appropriate, as these advocates only raise the questions in a disingenuous attempt to promote a religious agenda, under the pretense of open-mindedness and "teaching the controversy." In truth, there is no controversy in the scientific community about the dominant role of natural selection (evolution, the theory) in shaping the observed billions of years of change (evolution, the fact) of life on this planet.

But this response obscures the fact that very interesting issues in evolution remain poorly understood.

I'm not referring to the direct exchange of genetic material between single-cell organisms, although that does call into question the tree-like structure of relationships between these simple species. But at the level of complex, multi-cellular creatures like ourselves, this "horizontal gene transfer" is unimportant compared the "vertical" transfer from parents to offspring. The tree metaphor is still intact.

But even for complex creatures-- especially for complex creatures--there are important open questions about how evolution works in detail. The insightful (and cheap!) 2006 book, The Plausibility of Life, by Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, began to frame some answers to these questions.

The fundamental ingredients of evolution by natural selection were laid out by Darwin: heritable natural variations lead some individuals to be more likely to survive and thus to pass on these variations.

We now know in great detail how cells use some genes in the DNA as a blueprint for proteins, and how these proteins and other parts of the DNA in turn regulate when various genes are active. And we know, as Darwin could only imagine, how that DNA is copied and mixed between generations, only occasionally developing mutations at single positions or in larger chunks. We understand heritable variation.

We also understand the arithmetic of natural selection, which confirms Darwin's intuition: a mutation that improves the chances that its host will survive to be reproduced will spread through a population, while a deleterious mutation will die out (although evolution is indifferent to most mutations). This all takes many generations, but the history of life on earth is long.

But there is something missing, what Kirschner and Gerhart call the third leg of the stool: how does the variability at the DNA level translate into variability at the level of the organism? Selection must occur at this higher level, the level of phenotype, but can only be passed on at the level of the genotype. How do we close this loop?

It would be easy if a creature's fitness were some average of the fitness of each of the three billion bases in the DNA, but it's not that simple. For example, if two proteins work together as a critical team, a mutation in one can kill the organism, even if they could be an even better team if they both mutated in a coordinated way.

This sounds disturbingly reminiscent of the neo-creationist argument that life is so "irreducibly complex" that there must have been a creator--er, designer. But Kirschner and Gerhart don't believe that for a second. What they argue instead is that organisms are constructed so that genetic change can dramatically alter phenotype without sacrificing key functions--in a process they call facilitated variation.

In future posts I will discuss clues that this construction--I'm avoiding the word "design"-- is present in organisms today, and some of the principles it follows.