Evolution is not slow
I came across a very illuminating and exciting Edge article on the conversation of Richard Dawkins and Craig Venter yesterday.
Richard Dawkins is famous for his gene's eye view of evolution, author of the many books including The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, and The Extended Phenotype.
Craig Venter decoded the human genome, and more recently created synthetic chromosome from laboratory chemicals, a big step to creating "the first artificial life on earth."
Venter got publicity when he published his complete sequenced genome on the internet. It is conceivable that he might one day send his genome data via email and have the recipient recreate a Craig Venter clone. Very similar to how computer viruses spread through the internet.
The conversation between Dawkins and Venter, moderated by John Brockman and chaired by Hubert Burda, took place in Munich on January 22nd.
A transcript and a complete 1-hour video of the conversation are available.
The event was also widely reported by the German media, see Stern: Dr. Burdas digitales Gipfeltreffen, Spiegel: Craig Venter will Lebewesen e-mailen, and SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG: Die Zukunft der Selektion
Evolution is not slow.
I should have read the article before my post Why Evolution is Hard to Understand, because it could have cleared up some of my own misunderstanding of evolution. I have underestimated the power of biological evolution, when I said that it is a very slow process, which is true only if we look at the evolution of new species. But evolution also occur within species (so-called micro evolution).
We also tend to consider mostly the visible world, as Venter explains:
"In fact, it was one of the biggest surprises for the scientific community. What we found in the environment. Most people expected just one dominant species. What we found were thousands, tens of thousands, of very closely related organisms, all basically the same linear set of genes, tremendous variation in those genes. But there was not one dominant one. There was this community of related organisms where perhaps none of them had gone extinct, or, if they had, there were literally thousands of ones to replace them. The problem we've had, I think, with looking at evolution, I think it's been overly simplified because we've always been looking at the visible world, not the absolute majority of life on this planet, which is the invisible world."
Evolution in viruses happen very fast. "This is the world of biology that we live in, that we don't see, where evolution takes place on a minute-to-minute basis, not on the speciations of giraffes versus elephants versus kangaroos but the tens of millions of species that constantly are affecting the metabolism of our planet." (Dawkins)
Important role of viruses.
We usually think of viruses as something negative, like computer viruses which delete our files and spy on us, or worse, viruses which bring disease.
But virus is crucial in biology and cultural transfer.
The role of viruses in lateral transfer has now been better understood, which is of utmost importance as a third of our genome is virus, according to Venter.
Dawkins went further by stating that we are a huge society of viruses: "I would like to regard the genomes of the giraffes and kangaroos and humans that you refer to as just another set of viruses in close-knit societies. So the gene pool, I should say, of giraffes, or the gene pool of humans, or the gene pool of kangaroos is a huge society of viruses."
In this connection, Freeman Dyson thinks that evolution is now man-made and open source, referring to our role in changing the environment and the open source nature of material in viruses.
Environmental change.
The conversation confirms that what I called the second (change in environment) and third (change by genetic engineering, cloning, etc) strange loops of reflection are now in full force.
This changes can be good or bad or even destroy all of us.
Both Dawkins and Venter regarded climate change as a big threat. Technology must now find solutions to the effects generated by past technologies which lead to pollution, waste and climate change.
"It's a real-life danger that we're facing now. I've argued that we are 100 percent now dependent on science for survival of our species. In part, science of today has to overcome the scientific breakthroughs of previous years because we've advanced internal combustion engines, because we're so good at burning carbon that we take out of the ground, we did it blindly without any consequences of, that it might totally affect the future of the planet."
" What we're doing with burning oil and coal is we're taking millions of years of compressed biology, we're burning that over the course of years and putting it in the atmosphere."(Venter)
Nobody likes taxes, but carbon taxes seem necessary to deter people from destroying "millions of years of compressed biology". Could it be that high oil prices is a blessing in disguise?
Here Venter offers hope that biotechnology, which he calls "the only nanotechnology that works", could reverse produce fossil fuels from carbon dioxide. Power plants and cement factories could be used as abundant sources of carbon dioxide for this process. The product could then be consumed or pumped into oil wells and coal beds.
Is this too futuristic? Venter does not think so.
