COOPERATIVE EVOLUTION RECLAIMING DARWIN’S VISION COOPERATIVE EVOLUTION RECLAIMING DARWIN’S VISION CHRISTOPHER BRYANT AND VALERIE A. BROWN For Annie Bryant who has had to put up with parasites and mitochondria at the dinner table for 58 years and, in spite of that, managed to pass on to our children a very healthy mitochondrial genome, with love. And for Chris, Sarah, Elliot and Amon Brown who are taking the next steps in cooperative evolution. By mutual confidence and mutual aid, Great deeds are done and great discoveries made. – Homer Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au ISBN (print): 9781760464288 ISBN (online): 9781760464295 WorldCat (print): 1240754622 WorldCat (online): 1240754606 DOI: 10.22459/CE.2021 This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The full licence terms are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover design and layout by ANU Press This edition © 2021 ANU Press CONTENTS Acknowledgements . xi Glossary of Words and Phrases . xiii Introduction . 1 1 . In Homage to Darwin . 5 2 . All Knowledge is Metaphor . 17 3 . Intelligent Evolution and Intelligence . 31 4 . How Evolution Works . 55 5 . The Past is a Foreign Country . 75 6 . We Do Things Differently Now . 89 7 . Energy: Where it all Begins . 103 8 . Everything is Connected . 119 9 . Walling In and Walling Out . 133 10 . Becoming Human . 149 11 . Inheriting the Earth . 163 12 . Our Closest Cousins . 179 13 . Glimpses of the Future . 193 14 . Weaving the Golden Net . 211 Bibliography . 225 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We are most grateful to Emeritus Professor Sue Stocklmayer, Dr Hugh Tyndale-Biscoe, Dr Adrian Verrender and Professor Kim D Rainsford, who read the manuscript at various times and gave us detailed feedback. Their comments have greatly improved our work but its shortcomings are entirely our own responsibility. The late Professor Colin Groves was always available to answer questions and encourage us further. Chris Bryant is particularly grateful to members of his family, whom he used relentlessly as sounding boards: • Grandson Harry Rumble first read the earliest completed version and his enthusiasm for it was a great reassurance. • Son Tim Bryant heartened him further by remarking, with raised eyebrows and a note of disbelief in his voice, that ‘it was surprisingly readable!’ • Daughter-in-law Peta Swarbrick continued the process of encouragement by quoting his own work back at him during an argument. • Grandson Ali Bryant pointed the pistol shrimp at him, as an unusual example of symbiosis. The authors are grateful to ANU Press for a subsidy to support the publication of this book. All figures were prepared for the authors by Vladimir Zokic, unless otherwise indicated. xi GLOSSARY OF WORDS AND PHRASES ancient cell the original bacteria-like cells; prokaryotes ATP a molecule that contains usable energy chloroplast the green body (or organelle) in the cell of a plant, responsible for photosynthesis entropy in thermodynamics, a measure of disorder epigenetics the modern version of Lamarckism Gaia Lovelock’s name for the self-maintaining and self-organising planet Earth gene the unit of heredity gene expression the translation of a genome to make an organism genome all the genes of a single organism genus a group of similar organisms; e.g. dogs belong to the genus Canis homeostatic a homeostatic system is one which, if its current steady state is disturbed, tends to adjust in such a way as to restore it horizontal gene transfer of a gene from one individual to another transfer of the same generation Lamarckism the inheritance of acquired characteristics mEve a hypothetical ancestress of all humans mitochondrion the organelle, once itself an ancient cell, responsible (pl. -ria) in modern cells for the generation of energy modern cell a symbiotic construct of three or four ancient cells; eukaryotes xiii CooperaTive evoluTioN organ a group of tissues aggregated to perform a single function; e.g. the human liver organelle by analogy with organ, a structure within the cell that performs a specific function Protista single-celled plants and animals species the second order name of an individual animal or plant; e.g. dogs, Canis, belong to the species familiaris symbiosis the condition where two or more separate individuals are mutually dependent for their continued existence tangled bank Darwin’s metaphor for the interdependence of living things tissue a group of cells each performing the same function within an organism yAdam a hypothetical ancestor of all humans xiv INTRODUCTION A cooperative enterprise; how this book came to be written. If you choose not to read this and move straight on to In Homage to Darwin, we will not be offended. The story, however, of how two scientific dinosaurs came to cooperate in writing about their shared world view, gleaned from a combined total of more than 150 years of independent study of biology, needs, we feel, some explanation. Any two biologists can be relied on to arrive at different personal understandings of Charles Darwin’s magnificent legacy. However, few were as far apart as the authors of this book when they first met in the 1970s. At that time, a split was appearing in the practice of science. Traditionalists were persevering with the reduction of whole systems into their constituent parts, an approach that had led to the triumphs of the decipherment of the genetic code and the new science of genomics. A different way of thinking was combining science and new social movements. Post-normal science was beginning to accept that, for complex issues such as planetary climate change and global food security, scientists needed to practise their art where facts were uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent. The authors met, 45 years ago, in the Department of Zoology at The Australian National University (ANU). Chris Bryant was then a reader, with a flourishing research group in parasite biochemistry. He had remained a reductionist, focusing his attention on the subcellular mechanisms of respiration in anaerobic organisms. Val Brown, having raised a family, was a mature-age PhD student working in the then-new field of holistic thinking as applied to the human sciences. She was already a fan of Lovelock’s space-engendered view of the Earth as a self-maintaining and self-organising planetary system he named ‘Gaia’. 1 CooperaTive evoluTioN They did not hit it off. It is hardly surprising. They had begun at opposite ends, both of the world and of their discipline. Chris was born in North London in 1936. He was educated at an English public school. He first entered a biological laboratory in 1948 and instantly fell in love with the smell of solvents, the specimen cases and the microscopes. He came under the influence of Theodore Savory who, though a schoolmaster, was a major and well-published authority on spiders. He was also the author of a very reductionist, but well thought-of, book expressing these views (Savory 1936). After six years of exposure to his excellent teaching, Chris, like his mentor, was a confirmed reductionist. He felt that by studying the minutiae of organisms he would eventually come to understand the whole. This view of life was not dispelled by his time as an undergraduate at London University. After completing a Master’s degree and a PhD, in 1961, he met and married Anne, an Australian nurse. He decided to try his luck in Australia. He accepted a lectureship in zoology at ANU. Twenty-five years later he was appointed to its chair. Val’s first lesson in collective thinking occurred on leaving her conservative family and Anglican convent school for the University of Queensland. There, she found herself one of six women among 700 men and, despite distractions, obtained a combined zoology and botany degree. At this time, the influences on her thinking were the zoologist William Stephenson, well known for his work on the Great Barrier Reef, and the botanist Desmond Herbert, a biogeographer with a passionate interest in the subtropical rainforest. They were field biologists, and between them they cemented Val’s love for interactive biological systems as they occurred in the ‘real’ world. On graduating, she accepted a post of research officer, and so became the first woman scientist in the CSIRO in Brisbane. Sadly, it was then the rule for women in government employ to resign when they got married, and she had to leave. After raising three children, she returned to academia at The Australian National University’s Department of Zoology to undertake a Master’s degree that grew into a PhD on Holism in the University Curriculum? The question mark was important because she found that, while the curriculum professed to be holistic, it wasn’t. 2 iNTroDuCTioN Neither followed the expected pathways in their original fields. Dissatisfied with the context-free subcellular reactions that he had been studying, Chris began to pay more attention to the host–parasite relationship in its entirety, moving much closer to a holistic view of life. He developed an interest in the adaptive relationship between the parasite and its host environment and the interdependence that existed between non-parasitic organisms. Moving even further from mainstream reductionism, he relinquished his chair in 1996 and then, as professor emeritus, moved on to help establish the National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at ANU, of which he was the first director. On a converging track, Val applied the findings of her PhD to practical ways of integrating social and physical sciences in health, education, environmental management and government.