Origin of Group Identity Luis P. Villarreal Origin of Group Identity Viruses, Addiction and Cooperation 13 Luis P. Villarreal University of California, Irvine School of Biological Sciences Viral Vector Facility for Gene Therapy 3221 McGaugh Hall Irvine, CA 92697 USA [email protected] ISBN: 978-0-387-77997-3 e-ISBN: 978-0-387-77998-0 DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-77998-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2008934794 # 2009 Springer ScienceþBusiness Media, LLC All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper springer.com Preface A sense of belonging is basic to the human experience. But in this, humans are not unique. Essentially all life, from bacteria to humans, have ways by which it determines which members belong and which do not. This is a basic cooperative nature of life I call group membership which is examined in this book. However, cooperation of living things is not easily accounted for by current theory of evolutionary biology and yet even viruses display group membership. That viruses have this feature would likely seem coincidental or irrelevant to most scientist as having any possible relationship to human group identity. Surely such simple molecular-based relationships between viruses are unrelated to the complex cognitive and emotional nature of human group membership. Yet viruses clearly affect bacterial group membership, which are the most diverse and abundant cellular life form on Earth and from which all life has evolved. Viruses are the most ancient, numerous and adaptable biological entities we know. And we have long recognized them for the harm and disease they can cause, and they have been responsible for the greatest numbers of human deaths. However, with the sequencing of entire genomes and more recently with the shotgun sequencings of habitats, we have come to realize viruses are the black hole of biology; a giant force that has until recently been largely unseen and historically ignored by evolutionary biology. Viruses not only can cause acute disease, but also persist as stable unseen agents in their host. In this, they attain stability in evolution. It is from such a persisting relationship that viruses can inform us regarding the strategies and mechanisms of group membership. In order to persist in their host, a virus must be able to resist both themselves and all other competitors. In this persistence, viruses were the first genetic elements to show a strategy called an addiction module. In addition, persistence often involves mixtures of viruses that can even include nonviable, defective, even ‘dead’ members which work cooperatively to attain fitness. With these characteristics, viruses can introduce into their host new genetic identities that create group identities and group immunity, including altruistic-like individual self-destruction used for the protection of the group. From this relationship, we can trace how genetic parasites and the strategy of addiction modules have contributed to the evolution of group identity, a pathway that leads us directly to humans. Addiction modules can compel cooperation and symbiosis between v vi Preface individuals. They are composed of an essential combination of harmful and protective components that must act together to specify and stabilize group identity. From this perspective of genetic parasites and addiction modules, we can identify events leading to the evolution of group identity (immunity) and group cooperation in all life. We see that the molecular basis of olfaction of small molecules (pheromones) may have stemmed from bacterial toxins– antitoxins but has long been adapted by the earliest animals to identify and learn group identity. Both invertebrate and vertebrate animals have mostly retained this method for specifying group membership. In mammals, the basic maternal–offspring social bond has also maintained an olfactory component. However, during their evolution, the African primates experienced a great endogenous virus invasion (ERV colonization) that led to the disruption of much of this olfaction-based group identification. This loss promoted the emergence of a highly visual-based (facial) social bonding and identity system seen only in the African primates amongst mammals. This also required specific brain adaptations to support such enhanced social (and color) vision. This ERV colonization also altered the relationship between African primates and their viruses such that colonization by exogenous retroviruses has continued to promote hominid and human evolution. However, only human hominids evolved an additional system of group identity based on sound that utilized the enlarged primate social brain in order to learn song and language. Language thus originated as a human-specific system of group identity. The emergence of language-based group identity placed further demands on the evolution of an even larger social brain of humans. However, for language to be used as a system of group identity, its learning must be stable, linked to human develop- ment and also linked to the relevant addiction modules which are mostly based on emotion. Thus the emergence of language-based group identity also required the emergence and evolution of stable belief states along with the neurological substrates for belief attribution that link audio learning to emotion for social purposes. This development essentially liberated the evolution of human group identity from dependence on genetic parasites, promoting cultural evolution. However, the fundamental strategy of information-based identity and emo- tional addiction have prevailed. With the emergence of language and the large social brain of humans, we also see the emergence of a new dynamic mental state that we call the mind which is mediated by internal (language based) dialogue. In modern humans, the mind, not the genome, became the substrate for learned (acquired) group identity, aided by the development of reading. It is with our minds, not our noses, that we learn to belong. Irvine, CA, USA Luis P. Villarreal Acknowledgments This book is the product of decades of thought and investigation, but this was a line of thought that was seeded in the 1970s by my graduate mentor John J. Holland and later encouraged by my late friend and fellow virologist Edward K. Wagner. Without the early insight and unending encouragement of John Holland, I would have been unable to appreciate and pursue the fundamental significance of persisting viruses. Thus, this early interest in persistence has itself persisted during my career, in spite of the fact that its value to our under- standing biology has long been ignored dismissed due mainly to our intense, although necessary, focus on virus disease. Edward Wagner himself had also long been interested in viral persistence with the human herpesviruses. This viral lineage can trace its roots to the most numerous phage of bacteria; so it is indeed ancient. Edward Wagner was one of the few brave individuals willing to read and seriously critique the early (and often highly redundant) drafts of my writing. Through his early comments and suggestions, I grew more willing to follow the chain of concepts and evidence that took many years to complete and led me into fields that would normally be considered to far out for the normally over-focused area of expertise typical of most current scientist. The years of finding and evaluating the relevant primary scientific observations that led to the thesis of this book, however, became self-catalyzed and sustained my effort. The last chapter of this book concerns issues related to human learning. This chapter has also benefited from decades of my development and experimenta- tion in science education. For this I must thank the many students I have taught over the years, both those that benefited from my efforts and those that did not, as I learn as much from failure as from success. Like most scientist, I long, but incorrectly, believed that science education should be a relatively rational process requiring mainly clear and organized explanations. However, my obser- vations of students did not support this belief well, as I experienced a large variation in both successes and failures. Unlike my experience with science, experimentation with science education has been a more isolated activity. There were many more set beliefs to contend with but many fewer scientific resources (studies and data) to guide development. For this I thank NIH and NSF for grants supporting my extensive (but now limited) involvement in minority science education in the 1990s. Ironically, I came to realize that science vii viii Acknowledgments education is not often done by a very scientific process. My own development as a graduate student under mentoring by John Holland, however, was a purpo- sely unstructured but heuristic experience intended to develop independent (asocial) scientific thinking. This type of development seemed starkly at odds with the well-structured passive lecture-based process I had been adapted to and believed in as an undergraduate. When I became responsible for mentoring others, I started a long-term process of experimentation with student develop- ment. From this I concluded that problems in observation, in objective descrip- tion and in the separation of these activities from thinking, interpretation and belief were prevalent. The language and the structure of thought in science was (and remains) a problem for most students.