The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  It was probably in about this stage of life's evolvement that photosynthesis got seriously to work storing energy in the form of organic fuels of starch and sugar (page 51) and perhaps not much later than the new long-chained molecules expanded into the third dimension. Up to this time, you see, they had benefited by remaining largely in the two-dimensional surfaces of globules and pools, where they obviously had a better chance of joining one another (side by side) than if they had been drifting in a three-dimensional soup. But, having evolved to a more sophisticated level of maturity, they now naturally took to curling their sinuosity into spirality, the basic and efficient form that is the prevailing grain of the universe. Thus they advanced from reproduction in the manner of crystals and buds through a long evolutionary tournament of subtle pressures and selective eliminations (perhaps including something akin to a proto-mind filtering "yes" from "no") eventually to arrive at the genetic techniques of double-spiraled DNA molecules and all the emerging phantasmagoria of protein and nucleic acids with their never-ending varieties of genes and enzymes.

  Here, before it knew it, life must have perceptibly shifted into higher gear, for the relatively huge and complicated protein molecule has electric charges of varying magnitudes sparking provocatively along its bustling passages and galleries. It is a kind of microscopic grand opera house throbbing with music and drama, its doors swinging open and shut, its lights flashing on and off, scenery fading and shifting and players in the guise of enzymes gliding to and fro, while others called acids and alkalis fume and spit and kick each other out windows or down stairs. This protein also has certain attributes of a great sea beast so exuberant it alternately swells and shrinks, curls into a ball, spreads out like a fan, squinching and squirming and sloshing. Yet, generation by generation, it changes and mellows - and somehow the probing, mutating molecules integrate to evolve the cell, billions of them at a time deviously combining into each of these globular units that is midway between an atom and a man. And, from there in the last billion years, through such imaginative colonial ventures as slime molds and sponges, the cells have put together the whole fantastic kingdoms of vegetables and animals that inhabit the earth.

  SHAPE OF EVOLUTION'S TREE

  It is generally assumed that the tree of evolution, like other trees, has one main trunk out of which all its limbs branch off, but such a linear structure has not been proved and some theorists speculate that the tree may really have what mathematicians call a nonlinear form - which would probably mean several or many trunks like a clump of trees or possibly an interconnected system like a banyan tree with its pillar roots (page 64). Paleontologists have already dug up about two hundred species of extinct horses, for example, which evolved separately but more or less parallel to the ancestral lines of still-living horses and to each other's. The reason for such parallelism seems to have been that all the horse (and ass) forms were shaped by the same general environment. All were small animals at first (including even a probable "mouse horse" living in the forest) with at least four toes and simple molar teeth for browsing. But as they became bigger and heavier in their various ways, these evolving horses kept breaking their side toes and wearing out their short molars, most of them consequently going lame and hungry despite their evolutionary progress until they died out, only the elite few species which had most rapidly and efficiently evolved single hoofs and long molars surviving into modern times. Although horse evolution thus goes back irregularly over fifty million years to the leaf-eating rodent-like common ancestors of all the horse cousins, it is likely that looser parallels such as the one between large fish and dolphins or between the entire vegetable and animal kingdoms go back hundreds-of-millions, perhaps billions, of years before they merge in a common stem. However it seems almost inevitable that all lines of life must ultimately unite within some portion of Earth's history inasmuch as it must be improbable in the extreme that any line of life could rise to importance on a fluent and soluble planet like Earth totally unconnected genetically with the others. For all these offspring of the planet are, so to speak, ladled from the same stew, even if you consider that some of them may have derived from meteorites, no meteorite having ever been known to have originated beyond the solar system (a restriction that of course does not apply to the earlier dust and lumps that are thought to have glomerated the earth). All earthly genes therefore (unless they descended from life older than Earth) must needs be made of the same carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen atoms that are the principal ingredients of all life known to man. And it is just as improbable on the face of it that two intricate double-helix DNA molecules made of the same earthly (or solar) elements could have no genetic relation as that a chimpanzee and a man with almost every bone, muscle and nerve of the one corresponding to an equivalent bone, muscle and nerve of the other could have no ancestry in common.

  Students of evolution indeed are coming to see species of Earth's plants and animals as not so much disparate rivals as discrete steps in an integral planetary process, for obviously the wonderful variety of forms invented by nature would be diminished if all creatures just interbred without restriction in a common genetic melting pot. Which may be why most of the varieties have quantized or genetically isolated themselves by taking up courting rituals and other reproductive devices that effectively stop would-be mates who are so to speak not out of quite the same drawer.

  SPIRAL GEOMETRY AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

  Species evidently then originate in hundreds of ways - a lot more ways than Darwin had time to discover - and the factors involved range from cross-breeding to hydraulic pressure, from genetic mutations to the dynamic evolvement of the earth, including its climate. Why do some horns and shells spiral clockwise in certain species, for instance, and in others counterclockwise? At first you might think that the snail somehow originates the shape of its shell, but the truth is rather different - for present evidence indicates the snail does not so much curve the shell as the shell curves the snail. And since the shell, strictly speaking, is not a living body but a kind of house built of masonry by snailpower through an automatic mechanogeometric process, the snail itself is largely shaped by spiral geometric forces.

  Nature knows many organic spirals of course, ranging from the helix of DNA to the coil of an elephant's trunk, among which perhaps the most beautiful and important is the equiangular spiral. This particular curve, which James Bernoulli for good reason called spira mirabilis, is a function of the ancient Golden Section and the Greek gnomon (page 338), and it appears in such different functions as seashells and the flight of a moth to a flame, the latter happening when the moth's constant-angle navigation instinct lacks a distant sun to keep it on a straight course and steers in relation to a local flame instead. It is a curve that, in many different applications, progressively extends itself over a period of time, defining thereby a sort of living graph the unique feature of which (as I said in Chapter 12) is that its growth never changes its basic shape, a property incidentally important to any animal, such as a ram that might be fatally handicapped in a fight if his heavy corkscrewed horns did not keep a stable center of gravity.

  As found in nature, this equiangular spiral is frequently confined approximately to a single plane as in a chambered nautilus, a chameleon's tail or the floret pattern of a sunflower, but more often its graceful path describes a conical surface as in the majority of shells, horns and tusks. Pythagoras almost certainly knew and understood it and was awed, I like to think, by the beauty of its unvarying growth. At any rate he is said to have analyzed it as being composed of gnomons with the rather mystic collective power to create and preserve the structure of life in general, probably including the world. And this just could explain why living things seem to love the spiral form, why a single gene (itself spiral) can so easily reel out the unvarying gnomons that curve its developing shape, including the Fibonacci spacings of seeds and branches that so pervade the vegetable kingdom -even why a seeming minor shift (perhaps less than a mutation) in the
structure of the gnomon gene can counter a clockwise shell or reverse a pair of conjugate horns, as is thought to have actually happened to the rnarkhor, a wild Asiatic goat (with clockwise right horn) which is presumed the ancestor of the domesticated corkscrew goat of Asia (with counterclockwise right horn), the key step being a curious genetic realignment which has been observed in an embryologist's laboratory as early as the first cleavage of the fertilized egg.

  VARIATION AND SELECTION

  Could such a switch of spirality have been acquired in some unknown way in the domestication of the goat and then become inheritable? Geneticists generally deny this Lamarckian notion that any characteristic acquired by any creature (say a groovy lip developed by an oboist) can be transmitted to the next generation. And yet there are innumerable suggestive evidences of this, such as the growth of calluses on an ostrich before it is born, a trait obviously not needed until later, but one that appears to have been originally acquired long ago by ancestral ostriches who somehow absorbed it into their DNA as part of their machinery of inheritance.

  A theory trying to explain this says that the plethora of natural variations and mutations that happen by "chance" in procreation occasionally must produce gene combinations that grow body features exactly like those resulting from mechanical action (for example: calluses from rubbing) and that some percentage of these begotten "accidental models" inevitably will turn out to be advantageous enough to survive in evolution. Evolutionists call this the Baldwin Effect.

  Another possibility is that the progressive selection of advantageous effects of any live action (mechanical, thermal, chemical, etc.) may eventually make that action unnecessary, which is analogous to filing down a hair trigger until it becomes so sensitive that the gun will fire of its own accord. This hypothesis won important support from a classic experiment by C. H. Waddington in the 1950s in which he gave embryonic fruit flies a temperature shock which for some reason made a small percentage of them grow wings without their characteristic crossvein. When he then selectively bred the crossveinless flies to each other, repeating the shock, the percentage of veinless offspring increased generation upon generation until he was able to produce veinless flies regularly without the shock, which by then, to his amazement, had completed its initiation of this new strain of flies and was no longer needed.

  THE ENTHOPY FACTOR

  By some such interactions of heredity and environment (including the microenvironment of genes) evolution not only seems to be creating more and larger creatures on the average as the millenniums pass but also, curiously enough, it shows signs of moving from symmetry toward asymmetry. Presumably this is part of life's glorious unfoldment of simplicity into complexity, an unfoldment that appears to defy the Law of Entropy (page 444), which says energy on the whole within any system must flow from orderly forms (like engines and organisms) to simpler, disorderly forms (like heat and decay). The law, I note, does not say that minority energy may not flow from a disorderly locality to a more orderly one within a system so long as the majority flow goes the other way. And it does not even forbid a flow of the majority of all known energy from disorder to order so long as the system is open, as most systems in the universe seem to be (including the universe as a whole) with a possible unknown majority of outside energy flowing to disorder beyond the horizon of knowledge.

  This, I think, must be how the entropy law permits protein molecules and crystals to grow and evolve, letting the complex assembling of atoms in their lattices proceed so long as it is more than compensated by the simple dispersal of them elsewhere. Likewise in the case of plants and animals. For, while these are still more complex forms of life, they are significantly more abstract too and perhaps proportionately harder to fathom. Besides, they are but an infinitesimal part of the vastly larger and more permanent flow of substance out of the order of the sun and into the disorder of surrounding space. Indeed in such an entropic, celestial flow, involving photosynthesis, growth, nourishment, respiration and decay on Earth, the temporary organisms of life seem to me analogous to bubbles on a river, ethereal riders that momentarily drift along with the water but, in bursting, are soon revealed to be part of the sky. If you can stand a final analogy, I would say the resolution of the cosmic entropy-negentropy paradox is immeasurably more elusive than the similar incongruity of a national economy that is perpetually booming despite its chronic failure to make ends meet.

  THE TOURNAMENT OF EVOLUTION

  Backing off for a better perspective on the whole question, I find cause to suspect that the overshadowing of what might be called life's local bud by a much vaster celestial withering will in turn be scarcely noticed in the transcendent efflorescence of the universe. And while there is no generally accepted evidence of teleology in evolution in the sense of purposefully and provably directed channels of survival down the generations of selected species, evolution's purpose may well live and prevail, somehow subtly implemented by the energy conveyed by invisible waves out of the still very mysterious fields of outer space.

  Whether you call such a selective force a law of nature or God's will, it amounts to a discrimination, a discipline, a sorting and organizing influence - and in effect it exercises pervasive intelligence toward a goal, evidently toward good (if survival is good) and, for all we know, toward consummation of the fullest potentialities of the universe.

  Despite the appeal of this Olympian perspective, the whole idea of evolution and progression in life is so new to man that there is still serious doubt and controversy down there on Earth as to how it works and where it is going. Evolution indeed is like a tournament in which, instead of a few dozen or a few hundred contestants competing with each other under agreed rules for a few days or weeks, many trillions of rivals take each other on, catch as catch can, no holds barred, no trick untried, without any mention of rules, bounds, ages, sexes, morals or time limits whatsoever. And they battle each other and themselves, tooth, nail, imagination and digestive system, dead or alive, self to self, soul to soul, continuously day in and night out, summer and winter, for millions of millenniums, anywhere they can find one another, on land, sea, swamp, sky, under ground, under bark, under rock, under snow, under ice, under skin, inside intestines, outside sense, in trees, grass, gravel, foam, cloud, smoke, dust, dung, gravy, blood, lymph, gristle, bile, bone, brain, dream, mind, spirit - sometimes even beyond the world.

  No wonder evolution is all things barely considered the most exciting, dangerous, portentous and glorious experience there is! It even has engineering challenges right down to the microcosm and out of sight. I used to wonder why a unicelled animal like the paramecium could not evolve by becoming bigger and bigger without turning multicellular - in other words, by simply expanding its single microscopic cell generation by generation to the macroscopic dimensions, say, of a fish. The answer from a supposedly unreasoning planet is ponderably negative. It flatly declares that no microbe can ever grow big while it remains a unicelled organism, for the engaging reason that a single cell nucleus in any increasing mass of cytoplasm must inevitably develop "engine failure"- which would be fatal. The old Principle of Similitude (page 15) intrudes here, you see, by insisting that any material creature, if it is to move under its own power, must possess strength in approximate proportion to its volume or weight. In practice this means strength in ratio to the cube of its average thickness. It also amounts to a rigid size restriction because, like a steam engine whose energy depends on the heating surface (not volume) of its boiler, an animal has to draw its energy from the comparable oxygen-absorbing surface (not volume) of its integument or lungs. And it is this strict ration of energy generated on a slowly evolving two-dimensional surface that limits the faster-evolving three-dimensional volume of the cell, keeping it microscopic and incidentally obliging all the large animals, if they would live, to be composed of vast numbers of just such invisible and semi-independent parts.

  Now evolution and its converse, devolution, as you surely realize, have many aspects - more I su
ppose than all the evolutionists on Earth can ever know. There are evolutions and devolutions of every sort of behavior, of walking, breathing, aggression, of courting and loving, of diseases, of spider webs, of manners and fashions, of musical instruments and musical forms, of games, tools, inventions, machines and vehicles, of money, language, art, knowledge, of science and religion, of crimes, of virtues, of miracles, of the hand and the brain, of facial expression ... Every one of these facets of evolution in fact produces surprising revelations, such as the discovery that dogs express themselves more than pigs or bears because they are more social, indeed that dogs inadvertently evolved mouth and tail signals, as did man the smile, into a vital technique of communication.

  Have you ever wondered how such a spiritual concept as the Golden Rule ever managed to evolve in the face of the seemingly contrary Law of the Survival of the Fittest, since altruism, by definition, disregards the giver's well-being in favor of someone else, who thereby seems to be handed an advantage under natural selection?