Natural Genetic Engineering: Intelligence &Design in Evolution?
There are many things that I like about James Shapiro's new book "Evolution: A View from the 21st Century"(FT Press Science, 2011). He begins the book by saying that it is the creation of novelty, and not selection, that is important in the history of life.
In the presence of heritable traits that vary, selection results in the evolution of a population towards an optimal composition of those traits. But selection can only act on changes - and where does this variation come from? Historically, the creation of novelty has been assumed to be the result of random chance or accident.
And yet, organisms seem 'designed'. When one examines the data from sequenced genomes, the changes appear NOT to be random or accidental, but one observes that whole chunks of the genome come and go.
These 'chunks'often contain functional units, encoding sets of genes that together can perform some specific function. Shapiro argues that what we see in genomes is 'Natural Genetic Engineering', or designed evolution: "Thinking about genomes from an informatics perspective, it is apparent that systems engineering is a better metaphor for the evolutionary process than the conventional view of evolution as a select-biased random walk through limitless space of possible DNA configurations."In this review, I will have a look at four topics: 1.) why I think genomics is not the whole story; 2.) my own perspective of E.
coli genomics, and how I think it relates to this book; 3.) a brief discussion on "Intelligence, Design, and Evolution"; and finally, 4.) a section "in defense of the central dogma".
Author: David Ussery
Credits/Source: Microbial Informatics and Experimentation 2011, 1:11
Published on: 2011-10-31
Copyright by the authors listed above - made available via BioMedCentral (Open Access). Please
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"conventional view of evolution as a select-biased random walk through limitless space of possible DNA configurations"
While this tends to be the conventional view of the religiously inclined I don't think it fairly represents the most common view among those in the biological sciences, to whom selection marshals the observed directionality from stochastic molecular variations.
However, as you point out, this does not in itself fully explain the features that we would commonly considered to be
'designed".
Dawkins introduction of the neologism "designoid" , while interesting, unfortunately does not resolve the problem.
There is however, a way out that does not require the assumption of any kind of "designer", merely the full appreciation of the observable fact that selection is a function of a dynamically changing prevailing conditions which are themselves subject to evolutionary processes such that they are sufficiently often "just right". This seemingly an intrinsic property of natures machinery.
This very broad evoulutionary model is expanded upon (very informally) in "The Goldilocks Effect: What Has Serendipity Ever Done For Us?" (free download in e-book formats from the "Unusual Perspectives" website)