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Freeman Dyson On Open Source Biology
kripkenstein sends us an article by Freeman Dyson in the NY Review of Books, in which the eminent physicist and big thinker takes on the possible end to the Darwinian era of speciation that has endured 3 billion years on this planet. He discusses the history and future of biology in terms that many in this community will find familiar: "[We can speculate about] a golden age... when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information... Evolution could be rapid... But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share... [But] now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient... practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when... the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented."
This summary would leave any biologist apoplectic for its flaws:
1. Sex IS sharing. It's the ultimate cross-fertilization (literally). Almost all organisms, including humans, openly and enthusiastically share DNA via this mechanism.
2. Horizontal gene flow is terribly terribly limiting in its utility. Once organism becomes more complex, you can't plug-and-play like you can with a bacteria.
3. Horizontal gene flow does not foster rapid evolution in the same way that sex does. Picking up snippets and fragments from another organism is not as powerful as cross-over in sex (which does a far far better job of doing a controlled recombination of complete plans)
3. No organism in the world can resist "sharing its genome." If pirating the DNA of others was really that great an idea, then the human digestive track would contain tools for pulling DNA out of hamburger. It really would not take much cellular machinery to engulf a target cell, deconstruct it, and co-opt its DNA. The fact that horizontal gene transfer doesn't occur outside of simple organism should be an strong evidence of its limitations.
As much as I enjoy Freeman Dyson, he really lost me on this one.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
That's funny, which is how I assume he meant it. As a serious statement, it would be totally laughable except that a few people who know even less are going to say, "Ooh, Freeman Dyson. Must be good."
Like the commenter above said, biologists are just mixing and matching from organisms and hoping for the best. A simple regulatory cascade involves around sixty (60) proteins, and biologists have only the vaguest ideas about how to manipulate the process. And that's a big step up from even three years ago. Really. They have barely a clue. As a biologist who's taught college for decades, really, it's true.
Life was never "open source" in Dyson's sense. Horizontal gene transfer is always a rare event, even more so in multicellular eukaryotic organisms like, say, vertebrates or trees. Natural selection has always and will always operate because in order to survive, creatures have to be able to produce lots of offspring. However, there's not enough resources for all of them, and the ones less able to use the resources die. This would be true of any life, anywhere. It's not limited to Earth. Kind of like the speed of light is the same everywhere, and gravity operates everywhere.
Sure, people will get better and better at genetic engineering and biotech. And a good thing, too. Paralysis will become a thing of the past, as will blindness and failing organs. That's great. But it's not going to change life itself.