Stuart Newman/ Jeff Farias Show: Beyond Darwin

Stuart Newman/ Jeff Farias Show: Beyond Darwin

Jeff Farias & Stuart Newman

The Jeff Farias Show

Jeff Farias is a musician, activist and host of progressive radio's The Jeff Farias Show.

Stuart Newman is a professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College. His theory of form serves as the centerpiece of the Extended Synthesis, a reformulation of the Modern Synthesis (neo-Darwinian theory of evolution). He is co-author of the textbook Biological Physics of the Developing Embryo (Cambridge University Press) and co-editor of Origination of Organismal Form: Beyond the Gene in Developmental and Evolutionary Biology (MIT Press). newman@nymc.edu

12/9/2008 Phoenix (link to audio)

Jeff Farias: Joining me right now, Professor Stuart Newman. He’s a professor of cell biology and anatomy at the New York Medical College. Correct?

Stuart Newman: That’s right.

Jeff Farias: Dr. Newman, I had Suzan Mazur on about a month ago and we talked a little bit about your work, particularly what she terms “the Altenberg 16” – a conference of scientists from around the world who are re-examining aspects of Darwin’s theories on evolution, and particularly natural selection.

You bring up some really interesting ideas and interesting arguments, particularly the whole notion of the origin of form as being something that was abrupt rather than something that happened over a long period of time. I wondered if you could speak on that a bit.

Stuart Newman: Yes. Darwin’s theory is mainly a theory of incremental change. The big departure of Darwin’s ideas from earlier ideas was that he saw ways, from looking at domesticated animals and other organisms, of having small variations in populations becoming more prevalent under selection – thus moving the forms that are characteristic of a population from one step to another gradually. So that after long periods of time you’ll have very different organisms from what you started out with. That’s an idea that’s as good as far as it goes.

But it really doesn’t explain where novel structures come from. You might be able to understand how a bird’s beak could change its shape over time by this incremental mechanism, but it doesn’t explain where the beak came from in the first place.

If you look at the history of animals and plants, you see what we call innovations. Morphological novelties appear relatively abruptly. In most cases, there’s very little indication of any gradual change that led to the formation of something completely new.

We have many examples where we have something that’s already established changing shape – like the jaw will have a changed shape from one kind of organism to another. But where did the jaw come from in the first place?

The abruptness is also confirmed by looking at the very ancient animals. There was a burst of innovation that happened about a half billion years ago in what’s called the Cambrian Explosion, where most of the different kinds of animal forms that we see in the modern world seem to have appeared in the fossil record relatively suddenly.

I say relatively suddenly. It’s been narrowed down to maybe 20 million years, which is geologically a sudden event. And many of these forms were unprecedented in the fossil record. There’s just no suggestion that they were there before.

The idea that my colleagues and I have developed about this is based on evidence that modern organisms exhibit something called "plasticity," that is, they can change their forms in response to changes of the environment. There’s a certain amount of flexibility in the formation of organisms, in essence. If you turn the clock back and look at the most ancient organisms, there’s good reason to believe that this plasticity, this flexibility was even greater the further you go back. What that suggests is that there was a period in evolution when organisms could change abruptly from one form to another by very minor genetic changes or maybe very minor environmental changes because that’s the way flexible materials, or many non-living things that we know of, change their form in response to externalities. Organisms were able to do this very early in evolution.

In modern organisms there’s been a lot of consolidation or reinforcement of forms, so that we don’t see that plastic response. Modern organisms are not Lamarckian by and large. They have some ability to change in response to external conditions, but very ancient organisms were probably more Lamarckian. And therefore they were capable of changing in an abrupt fashion when confronted with new conditions.

Jeff Farias: Another concept – in reading about your work in some of the interviews you’ve done – this notion of self-organization of cells. You did an experiment with a chicken embryo, a limb of a chicken embryo. Breaking apart the cells and they reorganize in a Petri dish. Can you explain that?

Stuart Newman: We’ve shown that with the cells of a chicken limb. But it’s been known since the turn of the 20th century that if you take sponges, which are primitive animals, if you take two different kinds – a red sponge and a yellow sponge – and dissociate the cells and jumble them together, the cells will sort out like you’ve shaken up salad dressing and the oil and the water then sort out. This is an example of self-organization, or what in some cases is called self-assembly.

But what happens is that there are physical forces that are mediating the attachment of cells to one another and the interaction of cells – the signaling between the cells. This consideration of physical mechanism is what’s missing from many contemporary discussions of embryology and the evolution of form. It’s not just genes and cells that make up organisms but it’s also the formative processes, which act on these collections of cells.

Let me give you a metaphor. If we look at water, typically it is just still, with a flat surface. But if we agitate it, we can find waves on the water. We can find vortices or whirlpools of water. These are different forms that water can take because the material has a propensity to react to physical disturbances and take on certain forms.

Well, living tissues are very similar. They’re even more susceptible to active formative processes. So there’s a whole physics of materials that go into building an embryo.

We’ve suggested that in modern organisms the genetic processes have, over time, led development of form to become more routinized. More consolidated. And therefore you can miss out on seeing the physical aspect. But if you turn the clock back and look at the most ancient organisms, they were subject to physical formative processes to a much greater extent.

Jeff Farias: And some of these processes and organizational techniques were occurring before there were genetic . . . genes?

Stuart Newman: There were self-organizing processes before there were genes. That’s for sure. The physical world is full of self-organizing processes. That’s not a particular subject that we’ve studied, which is the origin of the cell.

There are other people who have looked at that. How the molecules that existed in the very early Earth got together to build genetic structures and the subcellular structures of the modern cell.

We’ve actually studied things post-origination of cells. We assume the existence of cells. At least a billion years ago and probably two billion years ago – there were already cells on the face of the Earth. And those cells were single-celled organisms. We have asked: what sorts of physical processes act on cells to cause them to form clusters? And once they form clusters, what makes the clusters hollow? What makes the clusters elongated? What causes them to be segmented? What causes them to extend appendages? And you can basically build up a modern animal form by looking at how physical formative processes act on clusters of cells.

Jeff Farias: To be honest with you, much of this stuff is over my head in terms of science, but I find it fascinating. You’re also working on the “Extended Synthesis” as it relates to Darwin. Can you help us understand that?

Stuart Newman: People have recognized for some time that Darwin just had part of the story. He was able to see how incremental changes reshape forms. But as I said, one of the things he did not look into was the origin of novelties.

But there are other things that Darwin did not consider. There are things that happen much more rapidly than Darwin’s incremental views would suggest. There are things that happen without genetic change as I said.

There are many facets. Darwin didn’t know about genes but he had his own theory of heredity. And what’s called the “Modern Synthesis” – which was established during the 1930s and 1940s and after – took Darwin’s ideas, incrementalist ideas, and consolidated them with ideas that came originally from Mendel on genetics and put them together into a view of how changes in genes relate to changes in forms that are seen in populations of organisms. The Modern Synthesis was considered for a while to explain most of evolution. Everybody recognized that there were exceptions, but the exceptions were considered marginal.

Then other things started turning up. Stephen J. Gould was a scientist who was very well known for finding things that weren’t readily explained by this picture. He talked about something called “punctuated equilibrium” where things seem to evolve in leaps and bounds. Evolution in a lineage paused for a long time and then it took another leap.

Then there was that burst of innovation that occurred very early in animal evolution: the Cambrian Explosion. Then there were things that happened in response to the environment.

A lot of scientists have started to rethink evolutionary theory and have extended Darwinism in a number of different ways. There are things that seem to not be consistent with Darwin. For example, standard theory of the Modern Synthesis says that it’s very unlikely to find genes harbored in a population that will make a huge difference in how an organism looks, in how it forms. But we’re beginning to find such genes in populations.

People in a number of different disciplines are extending Darwin’s theory in a number of different ways. Our physical model is just one of those extensions. Together this is called the Expanded, or Extended, Synthesis.

Jeff Farias: From a political standpoint what has the reaction been in the scientific community to challenging Darwin or to updating Darwin? Has that presented certain difficulties for you and your group?

Stuart Newman: People tend to be skeptical that there’s anything very new under the sun. There are people who have an interest in Darwin’s model as being essentially the right answer for all of evolution. So the greatest resistance comes from the die-hard Darwinists. But I think most evolutionary biologists have always recognized that there are exceptional cases not totally explained by Darwinism.

What’s happening now is that people are becoming a little bit more receptive to entertaining new theoretical ideas. I think that the debate now is whether Darwin’s mechanism is going to be a sideshow and evolutionary theory is going to be much broader, with Darwin part of it – or whether these new things are going to be the sideshow and Darwin’s theory is going to continue to be the main one.

It’s really just a matter of emphasis. My own feeling is that Darwin’s mechanism is not the most important mechanism of evolutionary change. But certainly many things have changed by Darwin’s mechanism.

Jeff Farias: I'd also like to get your opinion on the commercialization of organisms, the fact that there are all these experiments going on. With cloning. The genome projects out there. Genetically-modified food. From what I'm hearing from you, there seems to be a lot we still don't know about how cells behave, about what happens with genes. What do you think about such commercialization?

Stuart Newman: I think that's a very interesting issue. As long as Darwin's mechanism is considered the central one it allows some people to say that if you just add a gene or two to an organism, you're not going to get it to be very different from what it was before. And that genetic engineering of plants or animals, or even of humans, can be used to make improvements and it won't really lead to anything very abrupt or radically different.

There are people who say, for example, that the modern procedures and techniques of genetic engineering are no different than the breeding that farmers have always done throughout history.

I think that this is really wrong. It is based on an incorrect idea of how evolution has occurred. Natural selection is similar in some ways to the artificial selection that Darwin looked at as his model for evolution. But natural selection has not in general involved the importation of genes from one organism to another.

In those cases where gene transfer happened naturally in the history of life, it's often led to very big changes. So commercializers who try to reassure the public that what they're doing is not very radical and is nothing to get upset about, are really basing it on an obsolete theory of evolution.

Jeff Farias: Wow. I think there are a lot of potential dangers that they don't even have the ability to grasp. Not the specific dangers, but that there are dangers in genetically altering food or beings.

Stuart Newman: Right. I think so. The relation between genes and forms is not straightforward. If you believe that the only relation between genes and forms is the incremental one -- gradual changes in genes all lead to gradual changes in forms -- there's not much to get upset about. But, in fact, there's a whole intermediate level of determination, part of which is the physics that I've talked about.

You have cells. The cells have genes in them. The cells interact with each other via physical processes and they can make one thing or another depending on very minor changes in their situation.

I'll give you another example. Some worm-like organisms are unsegmented and some are segmented. There's not a very big difference in what those organisms are made of but there are subtle differences in the way that the cells interact with each other, the physical interactions are just tuned in a slightly different way. And then you get segments forming. And you can get segmentation to emerge in a very abrupt way in the history of life. You don't have to change very much to get something extremely different.

Since small changes can lead to radically new forms, genetic engineering opens up the possibility of disrupting the environment, of changing the balance of existing ecosystems. It's something to be concerned about.

Once you start to apply these techniques to humans, you're really doing experiments on people. It hasn't been done yet, but some people have called for it. Some policy analysts have said we should try to clone people. Or we should try to genetically manipulate people's inheritance so they come out smarter or they come out stronger or healthier, etc. Here you're doing experiments on people. It's very much more radical than is permitted in human subjects research in medical schools.

It's very irresponsible to call for such experiments because there are no controls on them. What you might wind up with after you've done this is a person who might be impaired rather than improved. And what do you do if you're striving for perfection and you get something much less than what you had hoped for -- discard it and try again? This concept of genetically engineering people leads to people being thought of as manufactured objects.

Jeff Farias: It is disturbing because it seems a lot of this stuff goes on completely unregulated. Companies like Monsanto seem to have a free rein over experimenting and genetically modifying food. We, in many cases, don't even know whether or not that's what is on our table. Is there a way to rein this in or is the genie out of the bottle?

Stuart Newman: A couple of genies are probably out of the bottle and there are a couple that are probably still in the bottle. But with regard to crops -- practically anywhere in the world except the United States, if you have genetically engineered food, it gets labeled. It certainly does in Europe and Asia.

Europe, in fact, has resisted genetically engineered crops to a very large extent. But there's a general consensus around the world, that if you have it, it should be labeled. And the commercial forces in the United States have fought against labeling laws.

They are appealing to ideas that genetic engineering is no big deal -- that's the first step. Then they say that people will just be alarmed if they knew that they were eating something that was genetically engineered. Genetic engineering is no big deal -- we don't have to inform them about it. So it's all kind of self-serving of commercial interests.

There are think tanks with professionals devoted to writing things based on poor biology and evolutionary theory, minimizing the effects of genetic engineering. They just go on and on about it.

Jeff Farias: I understand that on some level a balance needs to be struck between proprietary information and having the research you do protected. It's your property, it's your research. These companies having those kinds of protections. And someone who would oversee this and decide what is and isn't dangerous for humans to maintain their state on this Earth.

Stuart Newman: There are a number of considerations. There might be some technique that is reasonably treated as proprietary. Arguments might be made that until something has panned out for the inventor that it deserves protection by patents or as trade secrets You could argue for that. This just a matter of organizing research, accepting that companies can conduct research using methods that are not in the public domain.

But once they have done something with the invention, like changing what we eat and then selling it -- I think it's illegitimate for them to say that we're not going to tell you what we have done. It's on the market but we're not going to label it. There's something wrong with that.

Jeff Farias: Are there any more conferences coming up? Things that our listeners can be on the lookout for?

Stuart Newman: This meeting that took place last July in Austria, which Suzan Mazur called “the Altenberg 16” – the group didn’t call itself that -- this was a group of scientists who were invited to this very small conference because they were known to be critical of some aspect of standard Modern Synthesis theory and working to extend it one way or another. And in fact, there are many more such scientists and many groups around the world working to extend the Modern Synthesis.

But this particular group was involved in one of the small number of conferences explicitly directed to revising the Modern Synthesis. Our book will be coming out next year. Next year is the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species, Darwin’s famous book where he stated his theory of evolution. And it’s also the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. So next year, 2009, there will be many books and symposia taking place around Darwin’s theory. Most of them will be praising Darwin.

But there will be some not mainly praising Darwin’s legacy, or at least critical of the hegemony, the overwhelming force of Darwin’s ideas in contemporary theory, which extends well beyond the origin of species. People have tried to apply Darwinism to society, psychology, infectious disease, and beyond. So there will be positive and negative conversations about Darwinism.

It’s also the 200th anniversary of the major work of Lamarck. Lamarck was the great French biologist who, 50 years before Darwin’s book, published a book of his own in which he proposed a theory of evolution. It’s a theory that has come into somewhat disrepute but, in fact, Darwin did not (at least in some of his pronouncements) separate himself entirely from Larmarck’s theory. And Lamarck was there before Darwin was with a theory of evolution. He was just about the first scientist who seriously considered the idea that creatures on Earth evolved and thereby changed their forms. So there are also going to be conferences next year that consider the legacy of Lamarck as well.

During the whole period of the rise of the Modern Synthesis, Lamarck has been eclipsed and ridiculed, but a lot of the extensions that are being proposed for the Modern Synthesis have a Lamarckian cast about them. I think that over the next couple of decades Lamarck’s way of looking at things is going to be more incorporated into mainstream biology. The resurgence of Lamarck is something to be looking for in the next couple of years. . Things really are undergoing a change and reformulation. . .

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