Ingenious Genes

“Look at this kid! He’s just like his father! His features, his tone of voice, even his gestures!”, people often say. Let us now leave aside the case when behaviors unconsciously copied from parents are seen as inherited. This fascinating topic deserves a separate article. Let’s focus on when we really are born with some trait. How does ‘inheritance’ work?

Source: Dawnyell Reese, Pixabay

Well, the little birds told all this to Darwin when he went to Galápagos. It’s genes, of course. You know, deoxyribonucleic acid, which is a bit hard to pronounce, so let's just say DNA. You get half of your DNA from your mum and the other half from your dad. Or, if you're an LGBTQXYZW baby, you'll be getting it from both mums or dads, I’m sure scientists are already working on it. The point is that the DNA of the two parents combine to create new, amazing creatures, like you. And evolution is basically just a mistake. It happens because over time errors happen in the copying of DNA. These are called mutations most of which will wreak havoc, but sometimes one will make you fitter, better suited to changing circumstances. If this happens it will spread into the population slowly changing the species. This is how one type of finch became a bunch.

Darwin’s finches. Creator: John Gould. Source: Wikipedia

These days Darwin has fallen out of grace in esoteric circles, while Richard Dawkins, who popularised the theory of the selfish gene, is an absolute persona non grata. I love my grandchildren because it furthers the survival of my genes? What an idea! But genetics is a fascinating science, in many ways like astronomy. Astronomy is trying to uncover the mystery of the universe, while genetics is trying to uncover the mystery of life. The symmetry of Mendelian Inheritance is so aesthetic. The double helix of genes made up of combinations of four nucleotides so beautiful. Geneticists are constantly discovering fantastic things. And maybe there's something more.

Source: LaCasadeGoethe, Pixabay

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the French naturalist, believed in the transmission of acquired characteristics. People who have not studied genetics are, by the way, instinctive Lamarckists. They assume that when the climate cools, dogs grow thicker fur and pass it on to their offspring. According to genetics all that happens is that dogs with an already warmer coat survive, reproduce and spread their genes. There may also be new, random mutations more viable in the cold that will spread in the population.

The theory of inheritance of acquired traits has failed disastrously in the infamous experiments of Lysenko, a self-styled Soviet scientist. Lysenko wanted to reform agriculture, gradually acclimatising successive generations of oranges to the cold of Siberia. (Probably the only positive consequence of his efforts was the Hungarian cult film of the communist era, The Witness¹.)

Source: Nemzeti Filmintézet (Hungarian National Film Instituion)

Lysenko's less than brilliant efforts were heavily supported by the communist state and probably contributed considerably to the great famines of the Soviet Union. Eventually, albeit too late, the prodigy gardener was erased from the list of Great People and thereafter the inheritance of acquired traits became a taboo subject.

And yet, towards the end of Lysenko's reign, a new discipline called epigenetics was beginning to take wing. This means something like 'above genes', and looks at how genes in living organisms are expressed. It's like having an interpreter of your DNA that will translate some things and not others. This mechanism is influenced by the environment and, under certain circumstances, also affects future generations. Lamarck, in a way, was right. In certain cases acquired traits can be passed on. What we had always intuitively felt turned out to be true.

We can proudly pat ourselves on the shoulder — we have beaten scientists again. Intuition has triumphed over cold reason. But that's not all. The currently prevailing approach still contains a pretty strange feature. According to the dogma of the moment, life, this entire mirage, came into being ‘by chance’. A few molecules slammed into each other like bumper cars, started interacting, a cell membrane formed around them, and voilà, bacteria, paramecia, Michelangelo! You think I'm joking, that the sculptor is more distant from paramecia than the bacilli, but he isn’t, at least not in time. For at least three quarters of the four billion years of evolutionary history, only creatures without nuclei had been paddling around in the primordial sea. Michelangelo is but a short hop from a unicellular eucaryote. The whole megalomaniacal dinosaur explosion began just over two hundred million years ago, which, from an evolutionary perspective, was almost yesterday.

But let's get back to the point. If a series of random mutations produces change, then each intermediate step must be more viable than the one before. In complex structures, this is often difficult to imagine. Let’s take an example. A parasitic nematode, Myrmeconea neotropicum, lives inside birds. Its intermediary host is a species of ant called Cephalotes atratus, and in order to enter its final host it needs to have the bird eat the ant. How does it get the bird to do that? By changing the color of the ant’s abdomen to resemble ripe fruit. What's more, it makes the ant raise her reddish abdomen in a conspicuous way.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrmeconema_neotropicum#/media

Genes code for proteins. How does a new protein become a physiological and behavioral change in another species? How can such a complex mechanism evolve by chance? The current view is that the mutated gene of the nematode changes a protein in the nematode. This somehow makes the ant begin to look a tiny bit like a fruit. Thus the chances of a bird eating the ant are increased a tiny bit. Therefore the nematode will be a tiny bit more successful at staying alive and reproducing. Then, a series of further mutations in the worm will eventually make the abdomen of the ant red and raised.

This is not unlike saying that we're going to replace a brick on your aunt's blue house with a white one, which will make it look a tiny bit like the Taj Mahal. So once a year a tourist will mistake it for the Taj Mahal and pay an entrance fee. Then, with the money from the tourists, we'll gradually replace more bricks with white ones, which will attract more tourists. Eventually we'll build towers, and the house on the corner of Watt Street will look like a copy of the Taj Mahal.

Good luck. The only way I can imagine such an initially useless transformation is if it has a purpose. If the ‘concept’ of a future wing is already there in the lizard, that, while jumping from a tree to escape a predator, spreads its limbs to slow its descent. An alternative to the current theory would be that mutations are not accidental. They could be produced by the same intent that originally created living beings. The same force that makes creatures evolve, that invents all sorts of amazing shapes and ways of life. No, it’s not that dude sitting on clouds, ordering people around by way of stone tablets. He's been talked about a bit too much, and the story that he finished it all in six days hasn't been proven correct. Anyways, he is a bit too anthropomorphic and patriarchal, which is not that trendy today.

Source: Stefan Keller, Pixabay

And yet there can still exist a creative force that wants to try everything. All kinds of ways a creature can live. Flying fish, swimming birds, photosynthesis, critters swimming in acid and geysers, tardigrades that can survive in outer space. A life force that seeks the greatest variety, producing the most amazing creatures possible. Mimicry is a good example. When a seahorse hiding in seaweed already looks somewhat like seaweed, it's sure to benefit from a mutation that makes it even more seaweed-like. But this process has to start somewhere. We are obviously not talking about a conscious desire, but what if the seahorse, somewhere deep down in its being, wants to become like the seaweed that gives it shelter? And the series of mutations is not random at all, but stems from this ancestral desire?

Leafy Seadragon. Source: James Rosindell - CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45692802

It may seem like a strange idea, but maybe you get a feel for what I'm trying to say. Creatures don’t have to be perceived as mechanical formations. We can also think about them as pulsating little bundles of energy that know very well what they need, what they want, where they wish to evolve. Why are there so many kinds of living things? In industry, more efficient processes always displace outdated ones. When a new operating system comes out, some slightly earlier versions will still be around for a while, but the one from twenty years ago will have long since disappeared. That's not how nature works at all. After multicellular organisms and vertebrates have evolved, unicellular ones remained and so did the so-called 'lower animals'. (A denomination demonstrating true scientific objectivity.) When a natural catastrophe wipes out most species, the remaining small critters explode into the void, creating a multitude of new forms. That's how we mammals took the place of dinosaurs.

Physicists have known for a long time that the pool table model of the universe is out of date. Could it be time for biologists to realize that we're not just balls being hurled into each other? It’s becoming more and more clear that the world is more interesting than we once thought. In Hungarian the word 'inherit' is etymologically related to ‘eternity’. The place we all come from and go to.

1. A movie made in 1969 but banned for a decade exposing some of the bizarre features of communism, including the effort to produce oranges in Hungary. Its mood, strange humor and cryptic statements are some of the elements that made it into a classic.

The comrades, by the way, might have had some prophetic sense. The climate in Hungary may soon be fit for growing oranges.