Missing Martin Brasier (April 1947 - December 2014)
Sad news came at the end of December, Martin Brasier had been killed in an automobile accident. He had retired from teaching and I know he had plans for more books to follow Darwin's Lost World: The Hidden History of Animal Life and Secret Chambers: The Inside Story of Cells & Complex Life. Most of us from the last decade of the Margulis Lab were introduced to Martin Brasier in the Symbiosis and Earth History Seminar taught one semester by Dr. Michael Dolan, our lab’s expert protistologist. He had us read the Philosophial Transactions of the Royal Society B- Biological Sciences,Vol. 361, No. 1470, 2006 that covered the meeting, ‘Major steps in cell evolution: palaeontological, molecular and cellular evidence of their timing and global effects’ organized by T. Cavalier- Smith, M. Brasier and T. M. Embley. We all came away from that seminar completely won over with respect and admiration for Martin Brasier, paleobiologist, expert on foraminifera, astrobiologist, geologist and polymath. When Lynn went to England in 2009 to receive the Darwin-Wallace Medal and to spend her year as Eastman Professor at Balliol College, Oxford University, Matin Brasier became one of her colleagues. He later visited UMass-Amherst. I met Martin around the time of the Homage to Darwin debate on evolution. He was one of those people who had an infectious love for life and I liked him instantly. Here is a brief exchange from the debate. Martin and Richard Dawkins disagree over whether extinctions are selection events in evolution. I love Martin’s use of the phrase “there is an argument slightly against that”--its so tactful. Brasier, “This is the parable I tell and it’s a little story of a happy couple called Albert and Emily who are in their 40s or whatever, and they live in a little block Lynn Margulis & Martin Brasier of lats. And Albert’s taken to smoking cigars and at Oxford University, 2009 Emily gets tired of him smoking cigars in bed and asks him to go out on the balcony to smoke his cigar. And eventually she gets tired even of this because it stinks the lat out and she gives him a little push. A very slight push. He’s on the edge of the balcony. Over he goes and he falls down into the lowerbed. It stubs his cigar out, but Albert gets up and climbs back up because they’re on the irst loor. But she repeats exactly the same operation after she’s had them relocated to the 12th loor. She pushes with exactly the same force, but because of the energy built up in the system, of course the fall is fatal not only to the cigar but to him. My point here is: it’s not the meteorite, it’s the nature of the system that the meteorite or anything else perturbed. What we’re showing with this foram work is that often systems which experience mass extinctions seem to have tuned themselves right to the edge of ef iciency, so they’ve got enormously large, very complicated structures, and they are set up for the kill in some way. The answer is then that mass extinctions are caused by what happened in the 5 or 10 million years beforehand. Mass extinctions then require us to look at the connections within a system and understand those connections and the degree, the way in which they feed through the system. If that matters, if connections are important to extinction, and presumably connections are important to speciation and specialization too because you could argue that mass extinctions and speciation are part of the process, part of a systems process, which we ought to see in this bigger way. “ Dawkins, “Well, I suppose mass extinctions are very likely selective, but a very different kind of selection from the ordinary selection that goes on between mass extinctions. So a mass extinction is more like a one-off event. In the Permian extinction, most of the brachiopods went extinct and mollusks didn’t …but it’s a totally different kind of selective event from the one that produces individual level adaptations within brachiopods or within mollusks.” Brasier: “Well, there is an argument slightly against that which is the parallel pattern of distribution of extinctions, which suggests that mass extinctions are part of a parallel spread so that there is a sort of continuum from small extinctions through medium to very large. Which to me suggests that the nature of the causes as with the explanations for avalanches, big ones and small ones are not caused by different things. So it does raise the possibility then that we don’t have to look outside the system. What I’m arguing is we need to look inside the system and start to analyze system structure and to extrapolate that back through time.”
A GIFT TO THE ARCHIVE FROM LELENG ISAACS “Three 16 mm films made when I was Lynn's Ph.D. student. Lynn, Jim Schadt and I made these films over several Saturdays. Lynn only took Sundays off from the lab and as her student, I worked 7 days a week. Jim Schadt retired from BU around 1978 and moved to Iowa. He might have more stuff if he is still around. Also in the box are some original correspondence with Dave Chase, the other co-author in the 1977 Science paper on Microtubules in Prokaryotes. I also included a picture of Lynn Margulis taken in the 1970's. I think you can figure out the year by looking at the partial calendar on the back. Lynn was in her late thirties. Regards, LeLeng” ZOMBIE IDEAS The November issue of National Geographic magazine features a story about zombies. Mindsuckers: Meet Nature's Nightmare is written by science reporter Carl Zimmer and features gorgeous photographs by Anand Varma. The spread also includes graphic novellas by Matthew Twombly reminiscent of one of my childhood favorite comics,Tales from the Crypt. I was thrilled to see such creativity arrayed to introduce National Geographic’s readership to symbiosis and symbiogenesis! photo Anand Varma Then, I read the story. There was no discussion of the featured necrotizing symbioses (ecological relationships) that lead over generations to the various forms of evolutionary change (symbiogenesis) seen in the “zombies” and “mindsuckers” (symbionts) Instead, chief among the zombies in the article was the “extended phenotype”, an idea that is dead but thanks to “science reporting” still has legs. THE WALKING DEAD “…development is terribly complicated, and we don't yet understand much about how phenotypes are generated. But that they are generated and that genes contribute signi icantly to their variation are incontrovertible facts, and those facts are all we need in order to make neo-Darwinism coherent.” --Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (2nd Edition) (1990) Oxford University Press, New York, pg 22. In his book,The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins presents us with a new way of looking at the world as a network. A network of selfish genes that are not limited to the control of the inclusive fitness of selfish organisms, but a network of selfish “genes for” extended phenotypes (i.e., movement, growth, feeding, metabolism, habit, behavior, tools, works, biochemistry, excretion, or any other effect they have on the world). “Just as every gene is the center of a radiating ield of in luence on the world, so every phenotypic character is the center of convergent in luences from many genes, both within and outside the body of the individual organism. The whole biosphere...the whole world of plant and animal matter is crisscrossed with an intricate network of ields of genetic in luence, a web of phenotypic power.” pg 238 It is Dawkins inclusion of a parasite’s “gene for” the control of other living creatures that Zimmer offers up as the explanation of mindsuckers and zombies.
WAY WAR THREE To my request for a comment on the National Geographic story, Third Way evolutionist, James A. Shapiro wrote the following. ”Zimmer's story is another just-so story, positing a causal relationship and then concluding that it must be so without any evidence. To say that DNA encodes behavior ignores a great deal of molecular, cell, developmental and behavioral biology that document all the other factors that come into play. Saying something is a cause doesn't show it is a cause. Removing one part of the system and changing a behavior only shows that the eliminated part is necessary for the behavior, not that it is the sole or a suf icient cause of the behavior. All biology requires molecules encoded in DNA. But DNA is not suf icient. The butter ly and the caterpillar have the same DNA, but the history of development is critical to which appears at a certain time. The DNA of a normally developing salamander limb and a regenerating salamander limb are the same, but the developmental history is different. How can that be if the whole process is written in the DNA? The same goes for every example of embryonic regulation, regeneration, or healing that we know. Genomic data cannot express itself; a living cell is required. Only the cell reproduces itself. Extrinsic factors control how the DNA data get used. DNA is a rewritable memory system in a very complex computer, and we have yet to learn much about how the architecture of that computer evolves.” ALL MODELS ARE WRONG, SOME ARE USEFUL The incoherence in The Extended Phenotype begins with its assertion that its scientific facts (i.e., corrigible approximations) are precise and accurate certainties. It mistakes its models for accurate, precise and complete representations of nature (i.e., animals = life, DNA molecules = “genes for” extended phenotypes, random mutation = novelty, natural selection = evolution). It assigns to a part of the system an emergent property of the system (e.g., DNA replicates). It is reductionism that has forgotten the system(s) it artificially conceptualizes as parts, forgotten that systems are by definition more than the sum of their parts, and forgotten that parts of living systems often change radically when isolated. CONVERGENT EVOLUTION The Extended Phenotype is not without some thought provoking ideas. As I read the book, I noted quite an astounding number of instances where the arguments Richard Dawkins was making could have been applied equally well to the Gaia hypothesis, especially in its early days. Here are just three samples and they get better throughout the book. “What I’m advocating is a point of view, a way of looking at for familiar facts and ideas, and a way of asking new questions about them… I'm not trying to convince anyone of the truth of any factual proposition, rather I am trying to show the reader a way of seeing biological facts.” (pg 1)
“I use the example simply to demonstrate that it is possible for a theoretical book to be worth reading even if it does not advance testable hypotheses but seeks, instead, to change the way we see.” (pg 2) “One feature of life in this world which, like sex, we have taken for granted and maybe should not, is that living matter comes in discrete packages called organisms. … One of my aims in this book is to break that hold. I want to switch emphasis from the individual body as focal unit of functional discussion. At the very least I want to make us aware of how much we take for granted when we look at life as a collection of discreet individual organisms.” (pg 4) Dawkins must have found it bitterly ironic that his carefully constructed arguments for The Extended Phenotype adapted so easily to Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. As the arch foe of such “a lapse into sloppily unconscious group selectionism” (pg 6), Dawkins finally has to admit the truth of this in the pages of his own book. “There is a risk, which I had better forestall, that such talk of adaptation on a global scale may call to the reader’s mind the fashionable image of the ecological ‘web’, of which the most extreme manifestation is the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis of Lovelock (1979). My web of interlocking extended phenotypic in luences bears a super icial resemblance to the webs of mutual dependence and symbiosis that bulk so largely in the pop-ecology literature (e.g. The Ecologist) and in Lovelock’s book. The comparison could hardly be more misleading. Since Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ hypothesis has been enthusiastically espoused by no less a scientist then Margulis (1989), and extravagantly praised by Mellanby (1979) as the work of a genius, it cannot be ignored, and I must digress in order categorically to disclaim any connection with the extended phenotype.” (pg 234-235)
ANTHROPOCENTRICITY 101: Are Genes Selfish? Is Natural Selection Bad? During the Homage to Darwin debate on Evolution, Lynn Margulis asked how a gene, regardless of definition, could be thought of as selfish when it had no self. She was pointing out another danger of being anthropocentric: the inappropriate application of human values as metrics for natural systems. In 2013, Toby Tyrrell, a professor of Earth system science at the National Oceanography Centre, University of Southampton in the UK published On Gaia: A Critical Investigation of the Relationship between Life and Earth. You can use this link to find my review on Amazon if you want a longer explanation, but Tyrrell actually bases most of his critique of Gaia on neo-Darwinist (zombie) ideas and what he states as his strongest argument against Gaia theory rests on death as bad. He reasons that if Gaia regulated Earth to favor life, fewer or perhaps even no organisms would die. He ties this to “nitrogen starvation”, the lack of fixed nitrogen. So let’s say Gaia self-organized in such a way that there was enough nitrogen being fixed (by the cells that do that) to go around. That would only swap mortality from the fixed nitrogen users to the nitrogen fixers. Fixed nitrogen might no longer be a limiting factor, but the Earth would still not be able to support the reproductive capacity of the estimated 30 million extant species that compete for the other finite energy, gases, chemicals, water and habitable space of the biosphere. Natural selection would still maintain a balance of what is possible, would still recycle. As an emergent property of the Earth system that is both necessary and inevitable, natural selection is well beyond Disney dichotomies of good or bad.
CRITTERS SAM BOWSER WOULD LOVE Ann Cox sent along the following link to Lily Simonson’s website and she writes, “Have been thinking a lot about the late Lynn Margulis recently. Lily Simonson paints yeti crabs and other creatures that inhabit harsh environments. I wish Lily and Lynn could have met, but it's not too late for you to meet Lily. Google her after you have seen her website. Lily is a rather wonderful artist. Lily Simonson is worth revisiting, especially since she just returned from a SCUBA trip under the ice of Antarctica.” BOSTON GLOBE MAGAZINE HAS PROBIOTICS ON THE BRAIN A growing number of scientists now believe that gut bacteria can influence mental health. More food for thought about your gut instincts. Depression can be treated with probiotics. Lynn used to say, “If you feel like you’re falling apart, you probably are.”
DESPERATELY SEEKING SIGNS OF LIFE
The Lynn Margulis Archive at ScholarWorks is looking for HD videos of the Signs of Life: A Symposium Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of NASA’s Exobiology Program. Lynn, James Lovelock and Martin Brasier all spoke at this event and I have been trying without success since Lynn’s memorial symposium to obtain copies of these videos. If you know how these videos might be secured by the Archive, please write to me at [email protected].