Darwin's Blind Spot: Evolution Beyond Natural Selection

by Frank Ryan

Book Overview

While Charles Darwin's vision of evolution was brilliant, natural selection ignores a crucial force that helps to explain the diversity and wonder of life: symbiosis. In Darwin's Blind Spot, Frank... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618118128
• ISBN13: 9780618118120
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A look at Symbiosis and

After the emergence of the first examples of prokaryote life, it had been thought that bacteria competed among themselves. That is, if we could intervene into the life of a bacterium and ask the little fellow: What is it that you are doing? What is this imperative that you hold? We would expect the answer that the bacterium holds challenge and necessity. And based on all outward signs it looks as if the bacterium must compete for its survival because of some egocentric imperative. Otherwise, the bacterium can just go on strike and there would be no surviving bacteria to direct such questions to, and we would not be here to ask such questions because our own survival depends upon the success of bacteria. The bacterium is not an isolated unit onto itself. There is also everything else that makes up the biosphere and beyond. Is this imperative that the bacterium holds based on challenge and necessity of the individual cell? Or is it the empathetic wish of the biosphere to nurture the communities of prokaryote life and more? Is it the many, or the one? If it is our attention to avoid homomorphism, it must be that we cannot answer these questions. Therefore, the imperatives that life holds comes with two sides that are formally indistinguishable. Incidently, judging imperatives relates to the same confusion that Huw Price (see Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point) described regarding the perceived passage on time - a very important observation. Does time unfold by the thermodynamic arrow as energies degrade into states of maximum entropy? Or is this just an issue of perspective as it is just as plausible for low energy states to unit into more ordered states? Given that we hold these alternative views, it is not surprising that competing bacteria can fine tune their weapons to such an extent that they may win over their victims. They could be invited into their conquered host cells and become organelles like mitochondria and the cell nucleus. But the illusion of conquest is short lived. As the competing prokaryote cells find themselves to be one eukaryote cell, they discover a deeper symmetry and their felt imperatives flip as the competing bacterium find deep agreements in their mutual cooperation. Lynn Margulis will tell us this much, and Frank Ryan's book "Darwin's Blind Spot" presents a wonderful account of such symbiosis as discovered in biological evolution. In writing on Albert Bernhard Frank's work on trees and fungi, Frank Ryan (on page 24 of "Darwin's Blind Spot") concludes: "... The intimate cooperation between wholly different life forms - plants and fungi - is not only an amazing biological phenomenon but also a vitally important factor in the diversity of plant life on earth. It should have been of enormous interest to evolutionary theorists, but few scientists were paying attention. In those formative years at the end of the nineteenth century, as the fundamental principles of biology were being hammered into place in laboratories

Evolution beyond natural selection

The tenacity of Darwinian fundamentalism is such that even well-documented phenomena that don't tune with the paradigm tend to be factored out of the public literature. This book braves the uphill battle here on the theme of symbiogenesis, and is a good companion to the recent Acquiring Genomes from Sagan & Margoulis. Judging from some of the reviews of this book, the Darwin estab remains in standard form and really dislikes someone pointing out that symbiosis is a factor in evolution. That means such authors need to be taught a lesson, and most 'authors' will learn fast to reach the Darwin market. My problem with this approach is that it doesn't go far enough, and seems to be merely testing the waters with a relatively safe vein of counterevidence to standard Darwinism. But this much is still a good indirect critique of the obsessive focus on the competition factor in theories of natural selection. Bit by bit, it will sink in.

A New View of Oneness

There is a spectacular denizen of California tidepools that goes by the imposing name of Hermissenda crassicornis. It is an electric blue and orange sea slug with wavy appendages on its back called ceratae. At the white tips of these ceratae are cellular structures called cnidosacs. Housed in the cnidosacs are nematocysts, microscopic harpoons that hook and inject venom into the mouth of any fish that decides to make a meal of Hermissenda. The truly amazing thing about the nematocysts of this Aeolid is their origin. Hermissendas do not grow their own nematocysts; they obtain them from their prey, in this case, the Proliferating Anemone. Instead of digesting the nematocysts along with their surrounding tissues, Hermissendas sequester them and transport them out to the tips of their ceratae via perpendicular tubes that line their guts called diverticulae. There they are incorporated into Hermissenda's metabolism whole and fully functioning. It is a case of an intracellular symbiotic association called kleptoplasty. Another example of the "theft of body" of an intact organelle is the so-called "solar powered leaves that crawl." The marine sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, sequesters the chloroplasts of the algae Vaucheria litorea. These kleptoplasts reside within the cytoplasm of the digestive cells of Elysia and carry out photosynthesis. The sea slug provides carbon dioxide for the chloroplasts and the chloroplasts provide nutrients for the sea slug. It is possible that there is a redirecting of animal nuclear encoded proteins to the chloroplasts as well as some lateral gene transfer from algae to sea slug. If so, this example of symbiosis represents a true mixing of separate genomes. Perhaps it is also a modern recapitulation of the ancient phagocytotic events theorized to have been the origin of the chloroplast in plant cells and the mitochondria in animal cells. It certainly speaks to the issue that the dividing line between species is more blurred than the lay public is aware. Symbiosis as a driving force in evolution is the theme of Frank Ryan's wonderful book, Darwin's Blind Spot. The history of this controversial concept in the biological sciences is thoroughly examined as the other great process alongside natural selection and mutation by which evolution takes place. The narrative portrays symbiosis as a corollary mechanism to explain the staggering radiation of species descended from a common ancestor that Darwin's gradualism could not adequately account for. The social and political ramifications of symbiosis versus natural selection are explored as these concepts affected and inspired capitalism, socialism and the Eugenics movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As symbiotic theory approaches our day and age, the reader is given a grand tour through such bold and revolutionary thinking as Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, Gould's Punctuated Equilibrium, Dawkin's Selfish Gene and Margulis's Serial Endosymbiosis Theory. The

Exploring the importance of symbiosis in evolution

What Frank Ryan demonstrates in this book is that evolution by symbiosis has been a "blind spot" for evolutionists since the time of Darwin, and even today is greatly underestimated by the Darwinian establishment as a force in evolutionary change, especially in speciation.Ryan, who is an expert on viruses having penned such well-received books as Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues and The Forgotten Plague, begins with some interesting history from Darwin's time showing that Darwin did not (and could not, to be fair) appreciate the role symbiosis plays in evolution. Indeed Ryan demonstrates that the process of symbiosis, and its sister processes, parasitism, mutualism and disease, itself has been misunderstood. A relationship between species may begin as parasitism (or disease) and eventually evolve into a symbiosis. This experience between species has been going on since before there were multi-cellular organisms, and is a feature of every species in existence. All species interact with some other species in symbiosis.This central realization of the book leads to something like a new way of looking at evolution. Natural selection is still a factor, but not necessarily the major factor anymore. This is implied in the discovery not too many years ago that the mitochondria that inhabit the cells in our body are almost certainly the remnants of a once free-living bacterium that, long ago in the primeval soup or near an undersea volcanic caldron, entered a cell and stayed. We are then the product of symbiosis, which may have begun as one cell invading the other, and over the eons turned into a domestic living arrangement with the invading cell providing power to the larger cell as that cell protects and feeds the symbiont that is now earning its keep.How eye opening this conception is! Imagine the planet filled with life forms that are composed of a dozen, or perhaps hundreds of similar arrangements made over the eons. This is evolution not by gradual steps but evolution by saltation, with a new species arising almost (geologically speaking) immediately. Such a conception would explain many of the gaps in the fossil record.Ryan builds a strong case. Along the way he looks favorably upon James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis (one of my favorite modern ideas) and explores the role that viruses have had in gene transfers and speciation. He contrasts the neo-Darwinian reductionists (Dawkins, et al) with a different bred of evolutionary biologist including Lynn Margulis, Erik Larsson, Luis P. Villarreal, Kwang Jeon, John Maynard Smith, Eors Szathmary, and others. He also recalls some scientists who pioneered the ideas of symbiosis but never got the credit they deserved and were virtually ignored by the Darwinian establishment. It is surprising to see how "blind" the evolutionists were and how hard it was (and is) for new ideas to gain a foothold in any scientific community. But that is the way it should be: a new idea is just a notion until

An update on new thought in evolutionary theory--excellent!

I received a PhD at Cornell Univ. in 1971, in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, with a minor in Population Genetics. For most of the succeeding 30 years, though, I have not worked in the field of biology. This book was like taking a new Master's Degree to update the last few decades. Ryan is clear, exhaustive in presenting new data and the development of a new paradigm; the book is well footnoted and thoughtful. His thesis that symbiosis is as important as mutation in the mechanisms of evolution, especially speciation and saltation (major jumps) is very well supported by the data he presents. Although the body of the book is focused on the biological data and its meaning, the author doesn't stop there. The argument also connects sociological, spiritual, environmental and political consequences of evolutionary theory--eugenics and Social Darwinism to Gaia, the world ecosystem, and the need to conserve the biological resources of the earth; and ends with an appeal for the need for awe before this mystery. Excellent and indispensable!