Beyond Darwin: Evolvability and the Generation of Novelty Marc Kirschner
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Kirschner M BMC Biology 2013, 11:110 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/11/110 INTERVIEW Open Access Beyond Darwin: evolvability and the generation of novelty Marc Kirschner Marc Kirschner graduated in biochemistry from North- western University, moving to Berkeley for his doctoral research and with positions at Berkeley, Oxford Univer- sity and Princeton before he took a professorship at Uni- versity of California San Francisco where with Andrew Murray he did seminal research on the control of the cell cycle in Xenopus egg extracts that led to the discov- ery of how cyclin drives the cell cycle, and with Tim Mitchison on the dynamic instability of microtubules. In 1993 he moved to Harvard where in 2003 he became the founding Chair of the HMS Department of Systems Biology and was named the John Franklin Enders Uni- versity Professor in 2009. The two books he wrote with John Gerhart, Cells, Embryos and Evolution (Blackwell, 1997) and The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’sDi- lemma (Yale University Press, 2005), reflect his deep and longstanding interest in how biological systems evolve. Here he gives his view of the evolution of evolvability and its profound importance for understanding and ap- plying biology. What is evolvability - how would you define it? Marc Kirschner In some sort of tautological way evolvability is simply the capacity of a system to evolve. But more than that, in a Darwinian sense it speaks to both the amount of effectively what I mean is that if you make random variation that is subject to selection, and the nature of changes in mechanical systems they inevitably either that variation. And if there is something like evolvability, have no effect or they break the system, whereas bio- that would mean that systems are constructed in such a logical systems are able to survive random changes way that they generate a lot of phenotypic variation on sometimes better, or often not so much worse; so bio- which selection can act with a given amount, or a mini- logical systems are unusual in that you can make ran- mum amount, of genetic variation. But the variation dom changes and the system still functions, allowing must be variation of a special type: first of all, it has to random variation to accumulate. An important point be non-lethal because if it’s lethal it isn’t contributed to here is that some of these features are used by the or- the next generation; and second, I would argue that it is ganism to adapt during its lifetime. There may be a kind of variation that is more likely to be functional changes in the rate of cell division or the amount of a even for circumstances never previously encountered by secreted molecule, or even the shape or mass of a bone, ’ the organism. That’s a little more difficult to explain, but let s say. But these are things that occur in the normal physiology of the organism, which is clearly under selec- Correspondence: [email protected] tion, so the system has evolved to accommodate them. Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Warren Alpert Once you replace that physiological selection with more Building, 200 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA © 2013 Kirschner; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Kirschner M BMC Biology 2013, 11:110 Page 2 of 7 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/11/110 permanent genetic selection the mechanisms are already Can you give an example of generation of novelty there to adjust to these changes. that actually isn’t so novel? We can go to Darwin himself and his finches. You might imagine that to generate all the different beak shapes of That’s beginning to sound like Lamarckism - in the finches (Figure 1) [2] was actually difficult to do, and which Darwin, of course, also believed Darwin argued - and is one place where I think he may Well, that’s right. The main questions about Darwinian have overworked his theory a bit - that the changes had evolution that people have focused on have been genetic to be very, very small. For example if you had a change questions; but the great doubt about Darwin in the in the upper beak that was big and the lower beak was period after The Origin of Species [1] was whether you small, the beaks wouldn’t fit together; or if it was very would ever get a kind of genetic variation on which se- large it wouldn’t fit into the head, or the muscles lection can act to produce a really complex adaptive wouldn’t work, and then the whole system would be structure: how likely is it that an eye would develop? It non-functional and the animal would die and wouldn’t is easy to see that if an eye did develop, one could select make it into the next generation, even if it was headed for better and better eyes - but the origin of novelty is in the right direction. So it does seem that to generate more challenging. So Darwinian evolution is clearly a different beak shapes would be very difficult and need good mechanism for improving things - but it is not ne- many, many small steps. Now, the problem with small cessarily a good mechanism for generating novelty. So steps is the smaller the steps the less their selective ad- the question for many people is how is novelty gener- vantage. The other problem has been that in many cases ated? And I think what modern biology has taught us is the evolution took place in small populations that would when you look at novelty under the microscope it’s not not necessarily be able to accumulate all the mutations all that novel. The organism has the capacity to do a lot you need to generate the larger beaks, and certainly of different things physiologically, along with ways of nothing very extreme. But now we know a lot about regulating them with feedbacks and mechanisms that beaks - beaks are bony structures, they’re induced by constrain them so that they’re non-lethal in the physio- neural crest cells that migrate into the head at various logical realm, and it’s those kinds of mechanisms that places, and one of the main things driving beak size is help to explain the facility of generating novelty in signaling through the BMP2/4 bone morphogenetic pro- evolution. teins. Cliff Tabin showed in experiments he did several Figure 1. Darwin’s or Galapagos finches. Drawing from Darwin’s account of his observations on the voyage of HMS Beagle [2], showing the distinct adaptations of the beaks of the finches on Galapagos to different diets. Kirschner M BMC Biology 2013, 11:110 Page 3 of 7 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/11/110 years ago [3] that when you ectopically add BMP4 you So you think this kind of thing is going to be get bigger beaks, and they work. The head changes its important within our lifetimes in explaining, for shape, the beaks change their shape. These kinds of example, the metabolic changes that take place pleiomorphic effects in evolution probably derive from in tumor cells where you’ve got a highly evolved the mechanisms for generation of the beaks during the system that is extremely complex, packed with growth of the baby birds. So you already have mecha- feedback loops, and you don’t know what you’re nisms in place for integrating information to make some doing to it most of the time? sort of coherent change, and the evolution of novelty is People are right now thrilled to show how the complex not so difficult. adaptations of tumor cells are reflected in the cell’s gen- Even if you consider BMP itself, and how likely it is to ome. Of course some of that complexity is meaningful change, you can see many ways that this could be done, and some of it is not, and because genetic modification because you know what you’re doing: you’re changing is so easy to study and is so easy to represent, we con- the signaling of BMP. You could be changing the veniently forget that it’s the phenotype that is really amount of BMP or the number of BMP receptors. BMP under selection, not the genotype. So I think even just itself is processed and secreted, and the processing or se- trying to describe the genetic variation that underlies the cretion can be changed; there are secreted BMP antago- development of a tumor independent of understanding nists and they are subject to selection; all the elements the phenotypic consequences is really a mistake. But to in the pathway can be changed translationally, post- understand the phenotypic consequences we have to translationally, transciptionally; so all of the possible understand how a cell is built and why it’s built one way genetic modifications that could occur could be funneled and not another. That is a tall order. It is important to into a process that has so many feedbacks in it that it remember that a tumor cell is a cell that is taking advan- ends up with the proper beak shape.