(upbeat music)
- Thank you very much for
your very kind introduction.
I'm really honored to be
the Hitchcock professor.
I wondered why I was chosen
to be Hitchcock professor.
And then I received the
biography of Lillie Hitchcock,
and discovered that she was interested in
volunteer fire companies and
that's the reason I'm here.
Because I am in fact, my
most important role is as
President of the Marlboro
Vermont volunteer fire company.
(crowd laughing)
So, this may be the first
volunteer fireman you ever had
talking to you.
And I actually go to fires
and crawl on my belly
and stuff like that.
What I want to talk about today,
is the question of whether
we are mislead seriously in
our understanding of organisms
and their development,
and the mechanics of that
development, and the
mechanics of that development
and the evolution of organisms.
By the kinds of metaphors that
biologists use over and over
and over again.
Metaphors that carry with
them, as a metaphor must,
understandings and meanings
which are rubbish in biology.
But when you criticize your
colleagues for using those
metaphors they say, "Well I
know that's not true, but I have
"to explain it to the poor dumb public."
And the result is that the
explanations that are offered,
that are current, that are
contained in the science section
of the New York Times and
so on, are just very bad.
And they're very wrong, and
they give false impressions
of what we actually know about biology.
So I want to go through some
of these, rather rapidly.
And one at some leisure.
To try and convince you that
you should not be misled by
what professional biologists tell you.
Well, this is a very serious problem.
The problem of a democratic
society is, that one assumes
that in a democratic society that the
electret is educated.
Yet it is impossible for the
electret to be educated at the
present time to an extent
suffiencet for them to make
judgements about the esoteric
issues of the elite knowledge
of biology or physics.
I mean look, I was a physics
student as an undergraduate,
but I don't know enough physics
anymore to make intelligent
judgements about physical issues
and I have to believe what
Steve Weinberg tells me.
And if he tells me wrong
things, I'm stuck with them.
So you have to believe
what biologists tell you,
most of you, because
you're not professionals.
And it's extremley important
that you be cautious about the
metaphors that are used.
And let me begin with a
few and get rid of them
rather quickly.
One of the most famous pairs
of metaphors now in biology,
are metaphors about DNA.
I mean, if you never heard of
DNA you should go home now,
because it's not gonna help.
(crowd laughing)
One metaphor, one statement
made about DNA is that DNA
is self-replicating.
Everybody in this room knows
that DNA is self-replicating.
I mean you hear it over and over.
But that's nonsense.
DNA is not self-replicating.
It doesn't do any replicating by itself.
The DNA is in fact copied by a very
complex cellular machinery.
And noticed I used the word
machinery which is already a
metaphor and I'm in some difficulty there.
It's copied by complex cell machinery.
It is in face a rather
non-reactive molecule,
and I want to get to that in a moment.
But it does not replicate itself
anymore than you would say
that when you put a letter
into the Xerox machine,
that that will, and make
five copies of it that the
letter has self-replicated.
But that metaphor, the
copy of the document in the
Xerox machine, is a lot closer
to what actually happens
in a cell with DNA than the
notion of self-replicating.
In fact, nothing is self replicating.
No living thing, except
perhaps some organisms in some
sense can be said to be self-replicating.
I mean nobody can be self-replicating.
You know that.
(laughing)
I mean you might try it but
you wont' have much success.
(laughing)
So, DNA is not self-replicating.
It is manufactured by a
elaborate proteinaceous and
nucleic acid machinery,
already set up in the cell.
That's point one.
So never again, should, look, um...
People have sometimes compared
DNA to the holy grail.
Why?
Because the grail was said
to be self-replicating.
But the grail, rather the
contents of the grail cup,
only self-replicated on Good Friday.
(laughing)
And where as DNA is supposed to be
self-replicating constantly.
But it's a mystical notion that's wrong.
Second, DNA is said to make the organism,
or at least to make proteins.
That's the montra.
DNA self-replicates
then DNA makes proteins.
But that's not true.
DNA doesn't make anything.
The cellular machinery, again I have to
use the machine metaphor.
Cellular machinery, makes proteins.
It doesn't even make the proteins.
What happens is that the cell
machinery uses the sequence
of nucleatising the DNA, to
create molecules which are
strings of amino acids,
one after the other
in a particular sequence.
And then those strings of
amino acids are not proteins,
they're just strings of amino acids.
The proteins are a result
of the folding up of that
long molecule.
A folding that depends
completely on the, well does not
depend completely, but it's
wrong to say that that folding
is already dictated in the
sequence of these amino acids.
It depends on the cell machinery,
it depends on the meilleur
of the cell.
It depends on other proteins
coming along and helping it.
Chaperoning it as we say.
It depends on the clipping
off of bits and pieces.
The making of a protein from
a string of amino acids is
a very complex process, which the DNA has
nothing to say about.
We have an example of that.
Those of you who are so
unfortunate as to require daily
injections of insulin for
diabetes, know that at the present
time that it's no longer possible to buy
pork or beef insulin.
You have to depend on
something called Humulin or
a similar thing.
Which is human insulin
sequence made in bacteria.
The human insulin gene has
been implanted into bacteria
and they create this thing.
The trouble is when it was
first made, the humulin turned
out to have the right sequence
of amino acids, but it didn't
fold up right.
And the result was that originally it was
physiologically inactive.
It was discovered that you had
to unfold it again, because
the bacteria don't know
how to fold human insulin.
And refold it under some
circumstances which we're not
privy to because it's a trade secret.
And that made human insulin.
And there are problems with
that molecule, but the fact
of the matter is that DNA
does not make proteins.
All it does is it contains the
information of the sequence
of amino acids and other parts
of the DNA have information
about when the cells should make it and in
what part of the organism.
But proteins are the consqeuence
of a very complex process,
long after DNA leaves the picture.
So, please never again, never
again believe any biologist
who tells you that DNA is a
self-replicating molecule,
like the holy grail.
And that it makes everything,
like the holy grail.
The holy grail by the way,
was said to be all nourishing.
The knights of the grail got
all their nourishment from the
holy grail, which nourished,
as it says in the fable of
the holy grail.
(foreign language)
Without attendant and without steward.
I mean, it was just there
and it did all by itself.
DNA cannot do anything (foreign
language), which is the
cell of the body.
Okay, the third metaphor is
that however genes do it,
and I want to spend some time on this now.
However genes do it, genes
determine characters.
You have the nose you have
because you have those genes.
You have the smarts you
have because of those genes.
I have particular genes which
enable me to get up in front
you and speak without being a bit nervous.
Whereas my musician friends
for example, sweat profusely
every time they have to perform in public.
They have their own genes.
Genes make everything.
Now, that's also wrong.
Genes do not determine the organism.
This has to do with the
relationship between genes and the
way in which organisms develop.
And this has to do with the
metaphor of development.
You may not think of development
as a metaphor but it is.
The word develop means
literally to unfold.
To come out of the envelope.
And the notion that organisms
develop is inherited from the
nineteenth century.
The notion that the
program is somehow in there
and it unfolds.
There was, in the history
of biology a great struggle
between two schools.
One called the epigenetic
school and the other,
the preformationist school.
And the preformationist school
had believed that there was
a little man inside each sperm
and that all that happened
in the course of the life
history of an organism is that
little man got bigger and
bigger until finally it looked
like the men in this room.
The egg by the way had
nothing but nutrient in it.
(laughing)
I mean the real, well that was
that theory of development.
And you've seen pictures some
of you, of the little man
hunched up inside the sperm.
The epigenetists on the other
hand say no that's silly.
There's no little man inside the sperm.
The organism is actually
created and creates itself out
of a preexisting material,
which is quite different from
what eventually occurs.
And the historians of biology
tell us that the epigenetists
won the battle against
the preformationists.
But they are wrong.
The preformationists
in fact won the battle.
Because I propose to you that
there is no difference between
the claim that there's a little
man inside each sperm and
the claim that the complete
program will unfold to
specify that little man.
There's a difference in
mechanics, but the notion that all
of the information necessary
to make each one of you was
already contained in
the sperm and the egg.
Of course we've added the egg since then.
Is a preformationist notion.
It is the notion of the
development of the working out
of the preexistent program
which is inevitable and unfolds
in a succession of stages.
But that's not the way life is.
Organisms do not develop in that sense.
Unfortunately we don't have
another word to use, so I myself
will use the word develop.
The importance of that word
and what it carries is clearer
in some other languages.
I mean, for example, in Spanish,
the word for development
is (foreign language), the unrolling.
In German, it's (foreign language).
It means I take a ball of yarn and
I throw it out and it unrolls.
It's an unrolling, and that's
the German word for biological
development (foreign language).
And I once asked an Israeli
friend of mine, I want to take
advantage of a historical experiment.
Hebrew, which is now spoken,
being a biblical language,
had no words for
development of an organism.
So they had to make them up,
like they had to make up words
for railroad and telephone and so on.
And I asked him what word did
you invent to stand for the
development of organisms.
And he told me, and I
think I got this right.
If there are any Hebrew
scholars here forgive me.
(foreign language)
Which is the same word in
Hebrew as is used for the
developing of a film, which
has of course the image
latent in it already.
Except it's in the reflexive form.
So an organism develops itself,
just as a film is developed
in the developing bath.
Organisms don't develop in
this way, because it is not the
case that all the information
necessary to specify an
organism is contained already
in the fertelized egg.
It's just not true.
And I want to show you a few
examples of this, but I want
to quote one of the most
eminent biologists, a really
eminent molecular biologist
of the present time.
Syd Brenner, who gave the
opening address at the hundredth
anniversary of the
publication of Darwin's opus.
No, I'm sorry.
It was the hundredth anniversary
of the death of Darwin.
Which is perhaps more the point.
And what Syd said was,
and I heard him say it.
If you gave me the complete
DNA sequence of an organism
and a large enough computer,
I could compute the organism.
Now I have to say,
although I respect Syd as
a very great scientist,
that statement is rubbish.
It is not true, that if
you had only the complete
DNA sequence of the organism
and a sufficiently complex
interpreter, that the
organism would be developed.
Because the organism does not
compute itself from its DNA.
There is other information,
important other information in
producing an organism.
And Ellen, are you here Ellen?
Yeah.
Ellen Kolber is my visual aide.
And I want to show you an
experiment done in California,
which illustrates this as no
other experiment has ever done.
This is a cloning experiment.
This cloning experiment was done in 1938.
I mean cloning is nothing new.
Plants are easily cloned by
simply taking scissors and
cutting them into pieces
and planting them.
And those pieces planted
from that cut up plant are
genetically identical.
And you can then grow them
in different environments
and see what you get.
This is the famous work of
Clausen, Keck, and Hiesey,
done at the Carnegie
Institution of Washington
experiment station in the Sierras.
And what you see across
the bottom, this is what
Clausen, Keck, and Hiesey
did was to take sample plants
from nature, cut the plants
into three pieces and plant
one piece at a low elevation,
one piece at a medium
elevation, and one piece
at a high elevation.
So these are the three pieces.
This one, this one, and this
one, of the same genetically
identical plant.
These are three pieces of the same plant.
These are different plants.
So the different genetic types are here.
The clones of each
genetic type are vertical.
Is that clear to everyone?
And look what happens.
The plant that grew tallest,
at the low elevation,
did the worst at the medium elevation.
But in fact it did the
best at the high elevation.
The plant that was second
tallest at the low elevation,
was third, fourth tallest
at the medium elevation.
And sort of in the middle here and so on.
You notice they all flowered
at the highest elevation.
Some of them failed to flower
at the medium elevation.
And there's no relationship
between the growth of the plants
at the low elevation, and
how the very same genea types
grew at the medium elevation
and the high elevation.
If you actually measure the
heights in plants in centimeters
you'll find a zero correlation
across environments.
Now, Dr. Brenner, how is it
possible to make the statement
that the organism can be
computed from it's DNA when the
organism has failed to
compute itself from it's DNA.
Which of these sets of DNA,
which of these DNA samples
gives you the best growth?
And you can't answer that
question until you also in what
environment they were grown.
Because the order has completely changed.
And this is a classic experiment
which is seen over and
over and over again under
different circumstances when this
kind of experiment is done.
That at minimum, you must
not only say what the genetic
differences are, but you must
also say what environment
those genetic differences
were manifest in.
Development occurs within
some temporal sequence of
environments and is a lot
information in the environment
as well as in the DNA.
This is the most striking
example and people say,
well I know that.
I mean everybody knows that.
Everybody knows that there's
gotta be some effective
environment, after all if you
have the genes that will make
you fat and we starved you,
you would of course become
very thin and finally die of malnutrition.
So there's some kind of
general effect of environment.
And that is illustrated in
a picture I drew freehand
from a picture in Arthur
Jensen's famous monograph about
IQ's in humans.
And what Arthur Jensen was
illustrating for him, was the
effect of environment on IQ.
The different lines here
are different genetic types.
And we won't go into the
issue of who he thinks belongs
to this genetic type and that one.
The important point for him
was that there are some genetic
types that have low IQ and some high.
Of course if you put them
all in a deprived environment
there wouldn't be very much
difference between them.
And if you put them all in
a very enriched environment
there would be more difference,
but the important point for
him was, that the one was
lowest deprived environment is
also lowest in the enriched environment.
There's just so much you
can do with environment.
Now this is a very different
picture from the one
I just showed you.
And there is no evidence
whatsoever that genea types
are like this.
That's just made up.
It's made up up in order to
agree, yes environment matters.
But the order of the genea
types is what counts.
And therefore if you're smart
in a deprived environment
you'll be even smarter in
an enriched environment,
so let's not, we don't have to talk about
environment anymore.
It is sometimes said, well that
may be true for those plants
that you showed us, but
it's not true for animals,
it's not true for well known mutations.
I want to show, Ellen is going
to help me by showing you
a couple of other pictures.
Just to give you an impression of the
broadness of this phenomemon.
These are pictues of the
number of abdominal bristles
on the belly of fruit flies.
Okay, just to be as different
as I can from plants.
And there are three different
temperatures at which the
fruit flies developed.
And that line is the number of
bristles at low temperature,
medium temperature, and
high temperature for
one genetic type.
This one for a completely
different genetic type.
This one a completely...
There's no order to it.
Everything gets completely confused.
Some get more bristles as
it gets colder, hotter.
Some get more intermediate
and then come up again.
There's no pattern.
Okay, so that's abdominal bristles.
Another case is corn.
Everybody has heard about
modern corn gives you a
higher yield than old
fashioned varieties of corn.
This is a comparison
of an old variety corn
no longer planted.
This one here.
And a new variety, this one here.
Which does better, gives
you a higher yield of corn.
In all environments until
you get to an extremely good
environment, and then the
old variety does better
than the new one.
That is to say that
these cross each other.
And the fact that the matter
is that most farmers are
growing corn in these environments.
So they prefer this variety
and I understand that, but
it is not the genetic and
developmental case that this type
is unambiguously better than this one.
It depends on the environment.
And finally one more example
and then I won't bore you with
this point, particular point anymore.
My geneticists friends say,
well that might be true but what
about famous mutations in drosophila.
Mutations that really
interfere with development.
Well here's a famous one.
Drosophila eyes, they're sort of oval.
And one mutation will reduce
the size of these eyes
to a bar like appearance.
And here is how normal, so
called wild type flies, the size
of their eyes as a
function of temperature.
And as it gets warmer the size
of the eye a little smaller.
Here is a mutation called
infrabar, which reduces below
wild type, below normal,
the size of the eye.
But in this case it
increases with temperature
instead of decreasing.
And here's another mutation,
similar relater, in which it
decreases with temperature.
So both of these are unambiguously
smaller than wild type,
but they have completely
opposite environmental effects
on their development, and
they cross each other.
So that's an example of the most extreme
kind of environment.
Okay, so that's the first
point I want to make.
That you at minimum have to
specify the genea type and the
environment, developmental
environment of an organism before
you can specify what
the organism looks like.
So we have different models.
The top model is the one
where what matters is genes,
and all environment does is
to put in various factors,
there's a genetic plan
A and a genetic plan B.
So the organism A comes
out and the organism B
comes out the other.
And the environmental factors
are simply the sort of the
nutrient material
necessary for development.
Another plan is to say
that envrionment counts for
everything and genea
type counts for nothing.
And there are such characters.
The phoneme structure of my
speech for example, is as far as
I know undetermined in
any ways by my genes.
But the fact that I can
speak depends on my having
the right genes, because no
monkey will ever get up and
give the Hitchcock lectures,
because those monkeys
don't have the right genes.
Not because they don't
have the right environment.
So different environments
will give rise to
different organisms.
Organism A has the phonemic
speech of an educated American.
Environment B will have the
speech of a Chinese for example.
But we all have to have the
general genetic rules of
tongue and voicebox and brain and so on.
That's the alternative,
the opposite alternative.
And then there's the possibility
of what I've just been
talking about, developmental
interactions between
organism and environment.
In which genes matter and
environment matters, but there's
no simple ordering of the effect.
And you get different
organisms depending both on the
gene type and the environment
in no particular order.
Now what I want to say I that
these, this scheme is still
insufficient to understand organisms.
There's yet another factor
in the, what we call the
unfolding or developmental organism.
Which is neither
environment nor genea type.
If when you go home, you will
please hold up your fingers
to your mirror on your
right and left hand.
You will, most of you discover,
that there seems to be no
similarity or rather little
similarity between the
fingerprints on your right
hand and the fingerprints
on your left hand.
I've actually seen the
fingerprints of Sir Galton, one of
the most famous nineteenth
century hereditary researchers.
And you would never know those
fingerprints on the left hand
came from the same person
as on the right hand.
And that's well known
among fingerprint experts.
But look, the fingerprints,
which are the folded ridges of
your skin, developed inside
your mothers womb while you were
a fetus.
The genes on the right hand
side are the same as the
genes on the left hand side.
There are occasional mutations
in the cell, but in general
they're the same.
And the environment on the
left and right hand sides
inside the amniotic sac would
hardly be called different
on the left and right hand sides.
Yet you have completely
different fingerprints
on the two sides.
Indeed all, so called
bilaterally symmetrical organisms
are in face asymmetrical.
Fruit flies have different
numbers of bristles on the
right side and the left side.
Not on the average but
one will have seven here
and five here.
Another will have six here
and four here, and so on.
On the average it averages out.
People are asymmetrical in
many, many respects, including
their fingerprints.
What is the origin of the
asymmetry of development on the
fluctuating asymmetry development
on the two sides of an
organism when the genes are the same
and the environment is the same?
You can't talk about a different
environment on the left and
right hand of a fruit fly.
Which is no bigger than the
end of a pencil suspended on
the inside of a milk bottle.
I mean it doesn't make sense.
And we know the answer to that.
The answer is that there's
something which is sometimes
called developmental noise,
which doesn't say anthing.
Which means that the actual
division of cells, the timing
of division of cells, and
the exact ordering of those
divisions in a line and
so on, depends upon the
molecular state of the
cells internal to the cells.
But the number of molecules
inside any cell of a particular
kind is very small.
It's not like the chemists
who tell us that there are
Avogadro's number of
molecules in a test tube.
There are seven of these,
and three of these,
and nine of those.
They're very, they're the
essential molecules that are
important in the division of the cell.
They're displayed, they're
disposed around the cell in
different places.
They have to interact with each other.
And it takes time for
them to come together.
They have to be in the right
vibrational state, this is a
real quantum uncertainty.
They have to be in a right
vibrational state when they
meet each other.
And all of that is subject to
a kind of indeterminacy from
the quantum level up to higher
levels of indeterminacy.
And that means that whether a
cell divides at a particular
moment, and how often the
progeny cells divide in a given
period of time, has a
random component to it.
And I could tell one of these
random stories at length,
but I won't.
This has a profound
effect on what happens.
Let me give you another example and then
not go on with that.
If you take a single bacterial
cell and you sew it in a huge
flask of culture medium, which
is constantly being stirred,
so there's no chance for
the medium to separate
out in any way.
That bacterial cell will divide
in about 63 minutes, if it's
E.Coli at the right temperature.
The two cells that have come
from that cell then divide,
but the don't divide simultaneously.
First one divides, then
a few minutes later
the other one divides.
Those four cells don't
divide simultaneously.
First one, then the other,
then the other, then the other.
That's also true in the
development of embryos.
The one cell stage gives
rise to the two cell stage.
In your textbooks your told
the two cell stage then gives
rise to the four cell
stage, but that's not true.
What actually happens is after
the two cell stage, there's a
three cell stage and
then a four cell stage.
There's asymmetry from cell
to cell and lack of synchrony.
And pretty soon in a bacterial
culture the cell, once a cell
is dividing every instant,
but it's some other cell.
And the reason is, and we
have quite good knowledge
about that, because if some
molecule has to be in a certain
concentration in a cell for
division, say seven copies.
After the division they'll
be four copies in one cell
and three in the other.
Or worse still, five in
one and two in the other.
Well it takes a different
amount of time for the cell to
manufacture the missing copies,
depending on whether you're
starting with four, or three, or two.
And that results in a time lag.
And those time lags can have
profound effects on major
appearance, external appearance.
Because timing of development,
movement of cells from
one layer to another and
so on, have a big effect.
Some things will fail to
develop if the tissue doesn't
divide it in the right moment and so on.
So these quantum and thermal
statistical effects have a
profound effect on development.
And so we do not know what
an organism will look like,
even if we know the complete
genea type and the complete
environment of the organism,
because there is that
random uncertainty.
And that's summarized in the next slide.
These are girl who some of you may know.
They are the Dionne quintuplets.
When I was a boy, I couldn't
go to the movies without being
treated with the Dionne quintuplets.
For those of you who have
been born too late for the
Dionne quintuplets, these were
identical quintuplets born
to a fairly poor family in rural Ontario.
They were taken from birth by
the physician who delivered
them and the province of Ontario
and put into a zoo, where
you could see them being
taught, talking, playing.
You notice that they
are identically dressed,
identically shod, identically quaffed.
Everything was done to
make them identical.
First of all their genes
were identical, and secondly
their environments were made
as identical as possible.
By a deliberate public relations gimmick.
And these girls then grew up,
and became very angry at the
way they were treated.
But the important point is that
the life histories of these
girls, despite their genetic
and environmental identities,
grew up to have different
life history patterns.
Two took on a religious vocation.
Three were married.
A couple had children.
One died of a mental, in
mental disorder, we don't know
what she actually died of.
Another one committed suicide.
And only three of them are left.
I was gonna show you a picture
of the three surviving girls,
now women of 60.
They look sort of like sisters.
They do look like sisters,
they look rather similar.
But they're life history
patterns were utterly different.
So even though every attempt was made to
make them identical, it failed.
And that is consequence of
that developmental noise.
Social developmental noise.
Developmental noise in
the development of their
nervous systems.
So the two wanted to be
nuns, and three wanted to be
married women.
I say to you then, that
if you want to understand
an organism, you have to know
not only about it's genes,
not only about the environment,
but you must have adequate
models of the randomness of
development, both mental and
physical in order to have
a complete explication
of the organism.
So the metaphor of the termination
is not a correct metaphor
for anything biological.
Biological organisms are not determined.
They have a degree of
indeterminacy, which is as important
as the quantum indeterminacy
of elementary particles.
Now I want to spend the rest of my talk
on yet a last metaphor, which comes from
evolutionary biology.
And that metaphor is the
metaphor of adaptation.
According to the vulgar
theory of evolution,
organisms evolve because
genetic variation occurs,
that's certainly true.
And some individuals leave
more, some kinds leave more
offspring than others.
That's natural selection,
that's certainly true.
The consequence of that variation and
differential reproduction
is that the organisms become
adapted to the environment around them.
They start out not being adapted,
they start out in Darwin's
terms not fitting into the
hole in the environment
which they find them.
But they get changed in their
shape and morphology and
behavior until they fit better,
and the notion of fit and
fitness, which is a Darwinian notion.
Was literally meaning fitting into a hole.
And the notion of adaptation
then, is the notion that there
exists out there, in the physical world,
outside the organism, a place,
a kind of ecological place
for that organism.
And the evolution of organisms
is the shaping of the
organism to fit it into
that hole and the mechanism
natural selection.
Now what I want to say to
you is that adaption is the
wrong view of evolution.
Organisms and their environments
do indeed seem to be
marvelously fitting.
But that is not because
organisms adapt to a
preexisting environment.
For organisms to adapt, means
for the hole has to already
exist before the organisms do.
When I go to Europe, I take
an adapter for my electrical
stuff so that I can
plug it into 220 volts.
Adaptation applies a
model to which you move.
And that's what the word means, Ad-apt.
Become apt to.
But the fact of the matter is
the environments of organisms
do not exist before the organisms.
The physical world exists.
But the physical world
is not the environment
of any organism.
Environment of an organism is
a juxtaposition of bits and
pieces of that physical and
external biological world.
Which juxtaposition is
created by this sensuous life
activities of the organism.
Imagine describing the
environment of an organism that
you've never seen.
There's a non-countable infinity
of ways that you could put
together the outside world,
but almost none of them are
occupied by organisms.
You have to take the world
environment literally,
(foreign language) around.
The environment is organized
around the existing organism.
And there are no, just as
there is no organism without
an environment, there is no
environment without an organism.
We have a famous experimental
evidence of that.
And that was in the
design of the Mars lander.
There were two competing
designs for the Mars lander.
One was I think Josh Lederberg's,
which was essentially to
send up an electron microscope
and a long sticky tongue.
And the tongue would unroll on
Mars and roll back and there
would be dust on it, and the
electron microscope would look
at the dust and if you saw
anything that wiggled you'd know
there was life on Mars.
Or at least if it didn't
wiggle it had the right shape.
That's the morphological
definition of life, and I don't
know why some people are laughing.
Why are you laugh at the
morphological definition of life.
What you should laugh at is
the way they decided to do it.
Being scientists and
much more sophisticated
than poor Josh Lederberg.
They decided that you can't
tell life when you see it,
so you'll find it, you'll
determine it by it's physiology.
So what they did is to send
up, not this sticky tongue and
vacuum, and microscope.
They sent up a vacuum cleaner,
a tank type vacuum cleaner,
with a hose that went
out and sucked up dust.
The dust went into the vacuum
cleaner which was filled with
a radioactively marked
substrate, you know,
sugar so to speak.
And if there's any life on
Mars it would break down the
sugar, the carbon dioxide which
is released, would then be
radioactive carbon dioxide
and it would be detected by a
radioactive detector in the machine.
And sure enough, when the
lander landed and sucked up that
dust, the number of counts per
minute of radioactive carbon
started to up and up and up and up.
I mean I wish I'd been there,
people must have been jumping
up and down with mad glee.
And then suddenly it shut down.
Just bang.
And everybody assumed that
the machinery had shut down,
like this machine here.
But it hadn't, all the tests
showed the machinery was
still working.
So there had to something
else that had happened.
Well, there was a meeting at
MIT to discuss this problem,
I remember the meeting.
And to make a little fun of
it, what they finally did was
to take a vote.
And the vote was there
was no life on Mars.
(laughing)
I mean that's not literally
what happened, but that was
the outcome of the...
And what was decided instead,
correctly, was that what had
been observed was the break
down of the organic material,
and the evolution of carbon dioxide by a
catalatic reaction that
occurred on the finely divided
clay particles or soil
particles from Mars.
And that was reproduced on
Earth later in the laboratory.
You can reproduce that with
finely divided clay particles.
Now that's the one you should
laugh at, because the naivety
of the scientists, very good scientists.
It's easy to call them
naive at a distance.
That assumed that you knew
what life on Mars ate.
That is say you knew what
the ecological niche of
life on Mars was.
So you provided an ecological
niche and if there was life on
Mars, they would live in it.
But how can you know
what the ecological niche
of life on Mars is?
Indeed there are a lot of
organisms on Earth who wouldn't
ferment that broth.
I mean there are sulfur fixing
bacteria and all kindss of
anaerobic organisms and so on.
Why assume that the life
on Mars is escherichia coli
or whatever it is they thought it was.
This is a demonstration of the
fact that you cannot specify
the environment of an organism
that you have never seen.
The environment of an organism
has an relationship to the
organism which is complex
and has to be understood
in it's entirety.
And I want to go very briefly
because my time is fleeing
through the elements of that process.
What I want to say is that
organisms construct they're
environments they don't adapt to them.
It's not that the environment
is fixed and the organism
moves to it.
The organism evolves and in
evolving causes the formation
around it of an environment
which itself is also evolving.
Organisms and environments coevolve.
And that coevolution of
organism environments
has to be understood.
And I think the proper
metaphor if there is one,
is the metaphor of construction.
First of all, organisms decide,
let me use the word decide
which you'll understand I don't
mean that in a vulgar sense.
Organisms decide what aspects
of the external world are
relevant to them.
When I lived in Britain
there were birds, trushes,
that broke snails on the
roof tiles of my house to
eat the inside of the snails.
But there were also great
tits and ravens and so on,
who didn't do that and didn't
come anywhere near the house.
Now those roof tiles were a
very important part of the
environment of the trushes
who used them to make food.
But they were not part of
the environment of the crows.
The fact that the stone or
roof tile is part of the
environment of a bird
depends on whether the bird,
in sense interacts with it in
a meaningful way for its life.
The fact that if flies
over it doesn't make it
part of it's environment.
Propinquity is not what
determines whether environment,
what something is part
of your environment.
What determines it is the
functional interaction you have
with that bit or piece of the world.
It isn't just that birds
make nests, and moles burrow,
and people build beautiful buildings.
Every organism, every
organism, is in that process of
constructing an environment
in the sense of making
somethings relevant and
other things irrelevant by
it's behavior, it's
morphology, it's physiology.
Everyone in this room, at
this instant, is creating a
personal environment.
That environment, if I could
take pictures of you and I've
seen these pictures of using
(mumbles) optics, which depend
on the different optical
density, a refractive index
actually of the medium through
which the light is passing.
When I take pictures of you,
what I would see for each one
of you, is that around
your body is a layer of
moist warm air, which is
rising continuously and
going over the top of your head.
That moist warm air is
being created by your
metabolic activities.
You're creating the heat and
you're creating the moisture.
You live not in the
atmosphere of Berkeley.
You live in the boundary lair
which you are carrying around
with you and creating the moist warm air.
And the little buggies that
may live on you are living
in that boundary layer.
And if they get, for example
to big, they'll stick out
of the boundary layer and
they'll be in a different world.
The evidence for that boundary
layer and the importance
of it is what the newspapers
report as the windchill factor.
Have you ever thought
of why it gets colder
when the wind blows?
Why should it get colder?
I mean you get more molecular movement,
it'd gotta get warmer.
It's not because the wind is colder.
It's because it blows away,
not only from your individual
bodies, but from the buildings
in which you are, from
every part of the world
in which we're living.
That boundary layer and
exposes you for the first time,
to the world out there,
the real world out there.
So that's an example of construction.
And construction goes on at all times.
So organisms determine what
aspect of the physical world
is relevant to , and they
construct out of those
relevant bits and pieces
a world of interactions.
The third thing that organisms
do is that they change
that world in which they're interacting.
They both create it and destroy it.
Every act of consumption is an
act of production, and every
act of production is
an act of consumption.
By the way a prize will be
given to any of you who know
the origin of that quotation.
(mumbles) in fact is.
Good on you, you get the prize.
Every organism is in the process
of using up the materials
it needs and for it's life
activities and depositing
in the world, waste products.
Not just humans, I mean
every worm, every bird,
every bacteria, is destroying
the world in which it lives,
at the same time that it's consuming it.
Moreover, organisms are in
the process of producing the
world in which they live.
It isn't only humans that farm.
Fruit flies farm.
You can do experiments to show
that if you put a fruit fly
in a little bit of medium and
put some yeast on top for the
fruit flies to eat, those
fruit flies survive better,
the larvae, survive better
if there are more larvae
than if there are fewer.
Which is not what we usually
think, because the more there
are the the more competition.
But in fact what happens is
that the larvae burrow in the
medium and create tunnels.
And in the tunnels the yeast
grows, and therefore there's
more food for them.
Now if you put enough of course,
then the consumption
exceeds the production.
But every organism is both
producing and consuming.
And many organisms are in the process of
producing their own life materials.
Plants do that all the time.
Plants change the physical
nature of the soil in which
their roots grow, they
break it up and change it.
The exude chemicals called
humic acids through the roots.
Those humic acids encourage the growth of
fungi called mycorrhizae.
Which are important in the
nutrition of the plant.
So the plant is farming
fungus, which is then
nourishing the plant.
And every organism is
doing that at all times,
it is reducing and increasing
the materials of it's life.
So organisms both create and destroy.
Mort Saul, some of you may know Mort Saul.
He once said, "No matter how
cruel and nasty and vicious
"you have been today, remember
that every time you take a
"breath, you make flower happy."
So the fouling of your own
world, may be the enrichment
of someone else's.
Putting aside the joke, there
are features of the occupation
of the Earth, which are very
clearly examples of that.
I come from New England.
I live in a small town in New England.
And there used to be a
lot of pine forests there.
There were so many pine
forests that wood companies and
paper companies came
and cut them all down.
Thinking, bought them
first of all, and then
cut all the stuff down.
Figuring when the new ones
came up they'd have a perpetual
source of soft wood for paper and lumber.
But when they cut the pine
forest down, instead of
pine trees coming up, up came hardwoods,
which were totally useless to them.
And it was discovered by a
long series of historical
observations and experiments,
that the history of
New England pine forests, is
that farms when abandoned,
as many farms were after 1840.
The maximum population in my
town was in 1840, and then
decreased as every sensible
person quit the stoney soil
and went west to
Pennsylvania, Ohio and so on,
for the deep soils.
When farms are abandoned,
the first thing that comes in
is herbaceous vegetation,
and then pine trees come in,
blown in from other pines.
Those pines grow up.
But those pines are, produce
shade, which makes impossible
for their own off spring to grow.
So pines have invented the
conflict between generations,
so to speak.
They create a world which
makes it impossible to
replace themselves.
Instead of that hardwoods come in.
This is known as the
white pine succession and
that's very common.
And pines are what we call weeds.
Weeds are not the things
that grow in your garden,
necessarily.
Weeds are kind of life form,
which depend for their growth
on disturbed habitats.
They come into disturbed
habitats, they then change the
habitat in such a way, that
another generation of the
same species cannot grow there.
And so when they die out,
yet other species come in.
They make, they depend on
disturbance and then they change
that world to be immedicable
to their own kind.
And that's a very common
form of life among weeds.
Finally, well two things.
Another thing that happens
is that organisms change the
actual, transduce the physical
signals that come into them.
Your livers are not getting
warmer as a consequence of the
hot air I'm producing
because the impinging
thermal activity of molecules is
converted by your physiology,
which is in your genes
of course.
Into changes in the concentration
of various hormones and
other substances in order to
control your body temperature.
That happens, the one I think
of most graphically is what
happens when my wife and I
go out collecting fruit flies
in the California desert in death valley.
Once in a while you see a sidewinder.
I don't know how many of you
ever come across a sidewinder,
but when I come across a
sidewinder, the photons which have
impinged on my retina, and
the rarefactions of air that
have impinged on my ear
drums, become transduced
immediately into a form
of chemical information.
Namely my adrenaline goes up.
And I assume that that is
specific to my genes because
I'm sure that when one
sidewinder sees another one it's
adrenaline doesn't go up, maybe
some other hormone goes up
depending on the sex of the sidewinders.
But the transduction of external
information is a function
of your particular biology and it's not
automatic in the world.
So the environment that you
perceive, perceive, is different
from the physical nature
of what comes in on you.
Finally, and that's the last
thing I'll say about this,
organisms are mathematicians
and statisticians.
Organisms carry out both
mathematical integration and
mathematical differentiation.
The integration is time integrals.
Organisms time average
over long periods of time.
Trees flower when a sufficient
number of either degree days
or light days have, they
accumulate the information till it
reaches a critical level then they flower.
They lose their leaves when
both degree days and light days
have reached critical values.
They're averaging all the time.
And one way to average is to store.
Energy storage is a
form of time averaging.
Acorns store the energy of
photosynthesis that has been
put in, no plant dies
at night just because it
can't do photosynthesis.
And plants and trees don't die
in the winter because they're
not photosynthesizing, because
they have methods of storage.
The potato is a storage of a potato plant.
Then we take that storage and we store it.
So that the price of food
does not fluctuate immensely
from summer to winter.
It's averaged out because
we have mechanisms
of storing energy.
And then we have personal
mechanisms of storing of energy.
Which is the greater omentum in men and
other parts in women which
are storage mechanisms.
Then we social storage mechanisms.
The pot latch of the northwest
Indians is a method of
storing of goods over time.
And of course money is a form of storage.
Futures, the futures market
irons out the cost of food over
long periods of time.
It's kind of information storage.
And organisms differentiate.
They see, for example, looking.
When you see something, it
requires a kind of contrast
between light and dark, you see edges.
And if that contrast is not proper,
you can't see the transition.
But the most famous example
of doing differentiating,
of detecting rates of change.
Is copepods, little tiny water
fleas, worked on by Banta
back in the twenties and thirties.
What Banta found, water
fleas have both sexual and
asexual reproduction.
Usually they don't produce any
males, they produce asexually
producing asexual eggs.
But once in a while males
will suddenly be produced.
And they all mate, and
they produce sexually.
Why?
It turns out that they are
sensitive to the rate of change
of external cues.
If the temperature suddenly
shifts upward or downward,
they will produce males.
If the amount of oxygen goes up or down,
they will produce males.
If the amount of food in the
water increases drastically
or decreases they produce males.
Males are produced as a
consequence of rapid changes in the
environment, not as a consequence
of the average level of
the environment.
Those organisms are measuring
time rates of change,
and their physiology is sensitive
to time rates of change.
So to put it all together
then I want to say to you that
you should not think of
evolution as some fixed set of
problems to which organisms adapt.
The reasons organisms seem so
well and wonderfully fitted
to the world in which they
live, is because they have,
in large part not entirely,
accumulated a world around them
which is appropriate to their
own morphologies, physiology's
and metabolisms.
Of course they also change,
and as they change their
environment change, and
environments and organisms are
coevolving at all times.
And that's why they seem
indeed so well adapted
to each other.
Why the fit seems so good.
So when you think about the
evolution of life, you mustn't
think about it as the
movement of a fixed world.
And that means finally
let me say that it has
some political implications.
The slogan, preserve the
environment, is a slogan that makes
no sense in biology.
What you have to say is, that
every organism has a different
environment, and those environments are
changing with the organisms.
And all environments are in all times
in the process of change.
The political issue then is
not, stop the world, make the
environment the environment,
which doesn't exist.
Or even the human environment,
which doesn't exist.
The same as it used to be or is now.
The political issue is to decide
what kind of world you want
to live in, and then do your
best to direct the change in
environment, the inevitable
change in environment.
Which living and metabolizing creates.
In some directions, which
will be as suitable as they
possibly can for human life
and perhaps for animal life
and plant life, that's
an issue which is not a
scientific issue.
But it must be done on the
basis of knowledge of how
environments are changing and an attempt
to funnel those changes.
You must stop forever this
constant repetition of let's
preserve the environment.
And by the way, you can't
even talk about preserving
species, you can talk about
reducing the rate of their
extinction, but you can't stop it.
99.9 percent of all
species that ever existed
are already extinct.
And there's only one, well
there are two laws of life.
One is that all flesh is mortal.
And the other is that
all species will become
extinct eventually.
I mean if not tomorrow then
when the Sun becomes a red giant
and burns up the Earth.
So the issue is to direct the
direction and the rates of
change, not to prevent change.
Organisms are by their nature
evolving and the environment
in which they live is by
their nature evolving.
So please do not become
victims of these metaphors.
Let me leave you with a, I
don't know what to call it.
A (foreign language) of Norbert Wiener.
Who, in a paper which is not
generally known very well,
on science and it's forms,
said that you cannot avoid
metaphors, I couldn't avoid
them, I talked about the machine
metaphor and so on.
Since we have to use metaphors,
we have to be careful.
And what Norbert Wiener said
is, "The price of metaphor
is eternal vigilance."
Thank you.
(crowd applauding)
(upbeat music)
