The Science of Discworld III - Darwin's Watch tsod-3

by Terry Pratchett

  `We're all very good at it,' said the Dean cheerfully.

  `Magic is basically just movin' stuff around,' said Ridcully, but Darwin was looking past him. The Librarian had just knuckled into the room, wearing the old green robe he wore for important occa sions or when he'd had a bath. He climbed into a chair and held up a glass; it filled instantly, and a banana dropped into it.

  `That is Pongo pongo!' said Darwin, pointing a shaking finger. `An ape!'

  `Well done that man!' said Ridcully. `You'd be amazed at how many people get that wrong! He's our Librarian. Very good at it, too. Now, Mr Darwin, there's a delicate matter we-'

  `It's another vision, isn't it?' said Darwin. `It's my health, I know it. I have been working too hard.' He tapped the chair. `But this wood feels solid. This sherry is quite passable. But magic, I must tell you, does not exist!' Beside him, with a little gurgle, his glass refilled.

  Just one moment, sir, please,' said Ponder. `Did you say another vision?'

  Darwin put his head in his hands. `I though it was an epiphany,' he groaned. `I thought that God himself appeared unto me and explained His design. It made so much sense. I had relegated Him to the status of Prime Mover, but now I see that He is immanent in His creation, constantly imparting direction and meaning to it all ... or,' he looked up, blinking, `so I thought ... '

  The wizards stood frozen. Then, very carefully, Ridcully said: `Divine visitation, eh? And when was this, exactly?'

  `It would have been after breakfast,' moaned Darwin. `It was raining, and then I saw this strange beetle on the window. The room filled up with beetles-'

  He stopped, mouth open; a thin blue haze surrounded him.

  Ridcully lowered his hand.

  `Well, well,' he said. `What about that, Mr Stibbons?'

  Ponder was scrabbling desperately at the paper on his clipboard.

  `I've no idea!' he said. `Hex hasn't mentioned it!'

  The Archchancellor grinned the grim little grin of someone sensing that the game, at last, was afoot.

  `Mono Island, remember?' said Ridcully, while Darwin stared blankly at nothing. `A god with a thing about beetles?'

  `I'd rather forget,' Ponder shuddered. `But, but ... no, it couldn't be him. How could the God of Evolution get into Roundworld?'

  `Same way the Auditors did?' said Ridcully. `All the spacetime continuumuum stuff we're doing, who's to say we aren't leaving a few doors ajar? Well, we can't let the barmy old boy run around there! You and Rincewind, meet me in the Great Hall in one hour!'

  Ponder remembered the God of Evolution, who had been so proud of developing a creature even better fitted to survive than mankind. It had been a cockroach.

  `We should go right away,' he said, firmly.

  `Why? We can move in time!' said Ridcully. `The hour, Mr Stibbons, is for you to come up with some way to kill Auditors!'

  `They're indestructible, sir!' `All right - ninety minutes!'

  20. THE SECRETS OF LIFE

  THE DISCWORLD VERSION OF DARWIN'S vision may not be quite what Roundworld's historians of science like to tell us, but the two will have been done converged on to the same timeline if the wizards manage to have will defeated the Auditors, so we can concentrate on the after-effects of that convergence. In any case some features are common to both versions of Darwinian history, including apes, beetles, and parasitic wasps. By contemplating these organisms, and many others - especially those con founded barnacles, of course - Darwin was led to his grand synthesis.

  Today, no area of biology remains unaffected by the discovery of evolution. The evidence that today's species evolved from different ones, and that this process still continues, is overwhelming. Very little modern biology would make sense without the over-arching framework of evolution. If Darwin were reincarnated today, he would recognise many of his ideas, perhaps slightly reformulated, in the conventional scientific wisdom. The big principle of natural selection would be one of them. But he would also observe debate, perhaps even controversy, about this fundamental pillar of his thinking. Not whether natural selection happens, not whether it drives much of evolution; but whether it is the only driving force.

  He would also find many new layers of detail filling some of the gaps in his theories. The most important and far-reaching of these is DNA, the magic molecule that carries genetic `information', the physical form of heredity. Darwin was sure that organisms could pass on their characteristics to their offspring, but he had no idea how this process was implemented, and what physical form it took. Today we are so familiar with the role of genes, and their chemical structure, that any discussion of evolution is likely to focus mainly on DNA chemistry. The role of natural selection, indeed the role of organisms, has been downgraded: the molecule has triumphed.

  We want to convince you that it won't stay that way.

  Evolution by natural selection, the great advance that Darwin and Wallace brought to public attention, is nowadays considered to be `obvious' by scientists of most persuasions and by most nonspecialists outside the US Bible Belt. This consensus has arisen partly because of a general perception that biology is `easy', it isn't a real, hard-to-understand science like chemistry or physics, and most people think that they know enough about it by a kind of osmosis from the general folk information. This assumption showed up amusingly at the Cheltenham Science Festival in 2001, when the Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees and two other eminent astronomers gave talks on `Life Out There'.

  The talks were sensible and interesting, but they made no contact with real modem biology. They were based on the kind of biology that is currently taught in schools, most of which is about thirty years out of date. Like almost everything in school science, because it takes at least that long for ideas to `trickle down' from the research frontiers to the classroom. Most `modem mathematics' is at least 150 years old, so thirty-year-old biology is pretty good. But it's not what you should base your thinking on when discussing cutting-edge science.

  Jack, in the audience, asked: `What would you think of three biologists discussing the physics of the black hole at the centre of the galaxy?' The audience applauded, seeing the point, but it took a couple of minutes for the scientists on the platform to understand the symmetry. They were then as contrite as they could be without losing their dignity.

  This kind of thing happens a lot, because we are all so familiar with evolution that we think we understand it. We devote the rest of this section to a reasonable account of what the average person thinks about evolution. It goes like this.

  Once upon a time there was a little warm pond full of chemicals, and they messed about a bit and came up with an amoeba. The amoeba's progeny multiplied (because it was a good amoeba) and some of them had more babies (something funny here ... ) and some had fewer, and some of them invented sex and had a much better time after that. Because biological copying wasn't very good in those days, all of their progeny were different from each other, carrying various copying mistakes called mutations.

  Nearly all mutations were bad, on the principle that putting a bullet randomly through a piece of complex machinery is unlikely to improve its performance, but a few were good. Animals with good mutations had many more babies, and those had the good mutation too, so they thrived and bred. Their progeny carried the good mutation into the future. However, many more bad mutations accumulated, so natural selection killed those off. Luckily, another new mutation appeared, which made a new character for a new species (better eyes, or swimming fins, .or scales), which was altogether better and took over.

  These later species were fishes, and one of them came out on land, growing legs and lungs to do so. From these first amphibians arose the reptiles, especially the dinosaurs (while the unadventurous fishes were presumably just messing about in the sea for millions of years, waiting to be fish and chips). There were some small, obscure mammals, who survived by coming out at night and eating dinosaur eggs. When the dinosaurs died, the mammals took over the planet, and some evolved into monkeys, then apes
, then Stone Age people.

  Then evolution stopped, with amoebas in ponds content to remain amoebas and not wanting to be fishes, fishes not wanting to be dinosaurs but just living their little fishy lives, the dinosaurs wiped out by a meteorite. The monkeys and apes, having seen what it was like to be at the peak of evolution, are now just slowly dying out - except in zoos, where they are kept to show us what our progenitors used to be like. Humans now occupy the top branch of the tree of life: since we are perfect, there's nowhere for evolution to go any more, which is why it has stopped.

  If pressed for more detail, we dredge up various things we've learned, mostly from newspapers, about things called genes. Genes are made from a molecule called DNA, which takes the form of a double helix and contains a kind of code. The code specifies how to make that kind of organism, so human DNA contains the information needed to make a human, whereas cat DNA contains the information for a cat, and so on. Because the DNA helix is double, it can be split apart, and the separate parts can easily be copied, which is how living creatures reproduce. DNA is the molecule of life, and without it, life would not exist. Mutations are mistakes in the DNA copying process - typos in the messages of life.

  Your genes specify everything about you - whether you'll be homosexual or heterosexual, what kinds of diseases you will be susceptible to, how long you will live ... even what make of car you will prefer. Now that science has sequenced the human genome, the DNA sequence for a person, we know all of the information required to make a human, so we know everything there is to know about how human beings work.

  Some of us will be able to add that most DNA isn't in the form of genes, but is just `junk' left over from some distant part of our evolutionary history. The junk gets a free ride on the reproductive roller-coaster, and it survives because it is `selfish' and doesn't care what happens to anything except itself.

  Here ends the folk view of evolution. We've parodied it a little, but not by as much as you might hope. The first part is a lie-to-children about natural selection; the second part is uncomfortably close to `neo-Darwinism', which for most of the past 50 years has been the accepted intellectual heir to The Origin. Darwin told us what happens in evolution; neo-Darwinism tells us how it happens, and how it happens is DNA.

  There's no question that DNA is central to life on Earth. But virtually every month, new discoveries are being made that profoundly change our view of evolution, genetics, and the growth and diversification of living creatures. This is a vast topic, and the best we can do here is to show you a few significant discoveries and explain why they are significant.

  Just as physics replaced Newton by Einstein, there has been a major revolution in the basic tenets of biology, so we now have a different, more universal view of what drives evolution. The `folk' evolutionary viewpoint: `I've got this new mutation. I have become a new kind of creature. Is it going to do me any good?' is not the way modern biologists think.

  There are many things wrong with our folk-evolution story. In fact we've deliberately constructed it so that every single detail is wrong. However, it's not very different from many accounts in popular science books and television programmes. It assumes that primitive animals alive today are our ancestors, when they are our cousins. It assumes that we `came from' apes, when of course the ape-like ancestor of man is the same creature as the man-like ancestor of modem apes. More seriously, it assumes that mutations in the genetic material, the changes that natural selection has to work on - indeed, to select among - are checked out as soon as they appear, and labelled `bad' (the organism dies, or at least fails to breed) or `good' (the animal contributes its progeny to the future).

  Until the early 1960s, that was what most biologists thought too. Indeed, two very famous biologists, J.B.S. Haldane and Sir Ronald Fisher, produced important papers in the mid-1950s espousing just that view. In a population of about 1000 organisms, they believed, only about a third of the breeding population could be `lost' to bad gene variants, or could be ousted by organisms carrying better versions, without the population moving towards extinction. They calculated that only about ten genes could have variants (known as `alleles') that were increasing or decreasing as proportions of the population. Perhaps twenty genes might be changing in this way if they were not very different in `fitness' from the regular alleles. This picture of the population implied that almost all organisms in a given species must have pretty much the same genetic make-up, except for a few which carried the good alleles coming in, and winning, or the bad alleles on the way out[48]. These exceptions were mutants, famously and stupidly portrayed in many SF films.

  However, in the early 1960s Richard Lewontin's group exploited a new way to investigate the genetics of wild (or indeed any) organisms. They looked at how many versions of common proteins they could find in the blood, or in cell extracts. If there was just one version, the organism had received the same allele from both of its parents: the technical term here is `homozygous'. If there were two versions, it had received different ones from each parent, and so was `heterozygous'.

  What they found was totally incompatible with the Fisher-Haldane picture.

  They found, and this has been amply confirmed in thousands of wild populations since, that in most organisms, about ten percent of genes are heterozygous. We now know, thanks to the Human Genome Project, that human beings have about 34,000 genes. So about 3400 are heterozygous, in any individual, instead of the ten or so predicted by Haldane and Fisher.

  Furthermore, if many different organisms are sampled, it turns out that about one-third of all genes have variant alleles. Some are rare, but many of them occur in more than one per cent of the population.

  There is no way that this real-world picture of the genetic structure of populations can be reconciled with the classical view of population genetics. Nearly all current natural selection must be discriminating between different combinations of ancient mutations. It's not a matter of a new mutation arriving and the result being immediately subjected to selection: instead, that mutation must typically hang around, for millions of years, until eventually it ends up playing a role that makes enough of a difference for natural selection to notice, and react.

  With hindsight, it is now obvious that all currently existing breeds of dog must have been 'available'- in the sense that the necessary alleles already existed, somewhere in the population - in the original domesticated wolves. There simply hasn't been time to accumulate the necessary mutations purely in modern dogs. Darwin knew about the amount of cryptic and overt variation in pigeons, too. But his successors, hot on the trail of the molecular basis of life, forgot about wolves and pigeons. They pretty much forgot about cells. DNA was complicated enough: cell biology was impossible, and as for understanding an organum ...

  Lewontin's discovery was a significant turning point in our understanding of heredity and evolution. It was at least as radical as the much better publicised revolution that replaced Newton's physics with Einstein's, and it was arguably more important. We will see that in the last year or so there has been another, even more radical, revision of our thinking about the control of cell biology and development by the genes. The whole dogma about DNA, messenger RNA, and proteins has been given a reality check, and science's internal `auditors' have rendered it as archaic as Fisher's population genetics.

  It is commonly assumed - not only by the average television producer of pop science half-hours, but also by most popular science book authors - that now we know about DNA, the `secret of life', evolution and its mechanisms are an open book. Soon after the discovery of DNA's structure and mechanism of replication by James Watson and Francis Crick, in the late 1950s, the media - and biology textbooks at all levels - were beginning to refer to it as the `Blueprint for Life'. Many books, culminating with Dawkins's The Selfish Gene in the 1970s, promoted the view that by knowing about the mechanism of heredity, we had found the key to all of the important puzzles of biology and medicine, especially evolution.

  There was soon
to be a major tragedy, resulting from a medical application of that mistaken view. The sedative thalidomide was increasingly being prescribed, and bought over the counter, to treat nausea and other minor discomforts of the early weeks of pregnancy.

  Only later was it discovered that in a small proportion of cases, thalidomide could cause a type of birth defect known as phocomelia, in which arms and legs are replaced by partially developed versions that resemble a seal's flippers.

  It took a while for anyone to notice, partly because few general practitioners had experience of phocomelia before 1957. In fact, very few of them had ever seen a case at all, but after 1957 they began to see two or three in a year. A second reason was that it was very difficult to tie this defect to a particular potion or treatment: pregnant women famously take a great variety of dietary additives, and often they don't remember precisely what they've taken. Nevertheless, by 1961 some medical detective work had tied the spate of phocomelia down to thalidomide.

  American doctors congratulated themselves on having missed out on the pathology, because Frances Kelsey, a medical worker for the Food and Drug Administration, had expressed misgivings about the original animal testing of the drug. Her misgivings eventually turned out to have been unfounded, but they did save much suffering in the USA. She noticed that the drug had not been tested on pregnant animals, because at that time such tests were not required. Everyone knew that the embryo has its own blueprint for development, quite separate from that of the mother. However, embryologists trained in biology departments, as distinct from medical embryologists, knew about the work of Cecil Stockard, Edward Conklin, and other embryologists of the 1920s. They had shown that many common chemicals could caused monstrous developmental defects. For instance, lithium salts easily induced cyclopia, a single central eye, in fish embryos. These alternative developmental paths, induced by chemical changes, have taught us a lot about the biological development of organisms, and how it is controlled.