Given that the archive system does not preserve the attached files,
I include herewith the whole text of the NY Lecture
Best--Pedro
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New Year Essay for FIS
*Reflections on Evolution Theory. J. S. Torday*
1. *BRIEF CRITICISM of Current Evolution Theory***
When I think of evolutionary biology I think of Paul Gauguin’s
painting“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going
<https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrT6VvsKjRaox8AFGMPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTEyMWVmNzJpBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDQjQ5ODFfMQRzZWMDc3I-/RV=2/RE=1513397100/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fWhere_Do_We_Come_From%253F_What_Are_We%253F_Where_Are_We_Going%253F/RK=2/RS=61chECAD2IhvlKlXb8ri3l3xT8M->”.
These questions arise from time to time. In a sense, Darwin’s reply was
to free us from The Great Chain of Being, only to leave us in limbo with
metaphors like random mutation and Natural Selection, which are
scientifically untestable and unrefutable. I seriously began addressing
this problem about 20 years ago, having come across a new addition to
the Modern Synthesis, the application of developmental biology to
evolution theory, or EvoDevo. Thinking that the evolutionists had
discovered the kind of science being done by me and my peers on the
cell-cell communication mechanisms that mediate embryogenesis. Only to
find that _there is literally no cell biology in evolution theory*^1 *_.
This gap in the Evolutionary Biology literature is apparently the result
of a historic glitch, the evolutionists relinquishing the work being
done by Haeckel (‘Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny’) and Spemann
(‘Organizer’ hypothesis) at the end of the 19^th Century for want of
mechanisms for these concepts that would advance the field of
Evolutionary Biology. Instead, the evolutionists embraced genetics as
their means of promoting evolution science. **
In retrospect, that was an unfortunate decision since embryogenesis is
the only mechanism we know of that generates form and function, which is
the essence of evolutionary change. But the mechanism of embryogenesis
through growth factor signaling between cells would have to wait until
the mid-20^th Century. Having made one of the original observations in
support of cell-cell signaling and lung development, after 50 years of
investigation we had assembled a working model of lung alveolar
structure and function in 2007 *^2 *, employing dynamic space-time
mechanisms of cell-cell signaling necessary for alveolar formation and
function. Such a deep, transcendent perspective on the origins of
biologic gas-exchange, referring all the way back to the cellular
adaptation to gravity, begged the question as to how and why this
mechanism evolved. So I decided to apply what I knew about lung
development, phylogeny and pathophysiology at the cellular-molecular
level as a means of deconvoluting lung evolution *^3 *.
**
*2.**EPIGENESIS: new findings***
Such musings about the cellular origins of the organ of gas-exchange
were further advanced by the discovery in our laboratory that the cause
of childhood asthma was epigenetic *^4 *. Exposure of pregnant rats to
nicotine, the biologically active ingredient in cigarette smoke that
causes asthma, could induce this disease molecularly, cellularly and
phenotypically for at least three generations, opening up to new ideas
about how organisms directly inherit genetic traits from their
environment, as first suggested by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the 18^th
Century. The prospect of epigenetic inheritance being a major effector
of evolution gave rise to a novel way of thinking about evolution, not
as the Darwinian merging of gene pools for reproduction, but as a
heritable change in DNA readout, particularly with reference to The
First Principles of Physiology- negentropy, chemiosmosis and
homeostasis-homeorhesis- that emerged from the cellular approach to the
mechanism of evolutionary adaptation. Again, because there is such a
breadth and depth of knowledge of lung biology across species in
combination with lung pathobiology, it became apparent that there was a
causal relationship between geochemical changes during the Earth’s
history and their affects on the evolution of gas-exchange, reinforcing
the idea that evolution was non-random and that the forces of evolution
were those of Nature- gravity, gases, ions, heavy metals. By reducing
the phenotypes of development and phylogeny to their cellular-molecular
elements in relationship to what was occurring in the environment, a
narrative for evolution could be formed *^5 *.
*3. EPIGENESIS: its evolutionary significance *
For example, recent data on the history of oxygen levels in the
atmosphere have made it apparent that they have not gone up gradually,
but have gone up and down fairly dramatically, varying between 15 and
35% over the last 500 million years. The effects of hyperoxia fostering
giant organisms have been known for a long time, but no one had
considered the concomitant consequences of hypoxia, the most potent
natural effector of physiology known. The effects of alternating
hyperoxia and hypoxia gave way to an evolutionary understanding of the
advent of endothermy/homeothermy *^6 *, and to insights to consciousness
that diverged from various dogmas of biology.
A recent breakthrough in transcending descriptive biology is the
recognition of the critical importance of epigenetic inheritance in the
evolutionary process and its crucial role in reproduction. Indeed,
mammalian reproduction is critically dependent upon several endoviral
endogenizations. Lewis Wolpert *^7 * has stated that “It is not birth,
death or marriage, but gastrulation which is truly the most important
time in your life”, gastrulation being the stage of embryogenesis during
which the mesodermal germ layer is formed, dictating the further
development of the fetus through interactions between the mesoderm,
endoderm and ectoderm. It is now known that the genes that control the
transition from the blastula to the gastrula undergo epigenetic
modifications, offering a mechanistic basis for understanding how such
epigenetic marks affect embryogenesis. Therefore, the local environment
largely determines the immediate impact of epigenetic inheritance that
is limited and edited during meiosis, and then again during
morphogenesis as a derivative of the unicellular state. Therefore, the
zygotic unicellular state must be properly appreciated as the crucial
intermediary in the modulation of these epigenetic influences, not
merely because that phase lies between, but as the embodiment of the
reiteratively-elaborated eukaryotic organism. The obligatory return to
the unicellular stage through sexual reproduction is the controlled
process that permits that crucial re-centering and modulation of both
the Epigenome and the intrinsic genome. It is this recapitulation
through the zygotic unicell with its unique capacities that can account
for both the remarkable stability over time of many species and the
phenotypic plasticity of others, something that cannot be readily
accommodated by a random mutation/selection Darwinian model.
Indeed, the proper perspective for the extent of the influence of the
zygotic unicell is to look beyond the alluring structure and function of
multicellular organisms and instead accept that eukaryotic organisms
have never actually left their unicellular state—the myriad permutations
and combinations that Francois Jacob referred to as “tinkering” *^8 *
are merely ways in which the dominant unicell has flexibly adapted to an
ever-changing environment. It is as if the unicellular state delegates
its progeny to interact with the environment as agents, collecting data
to inform the recapitulating unicell of ecological changes that are
occurring. Through the acquisition and filtering of epigenetic marks via
meiosis, fertilization, and embryogenesis, even on into adulthood, where
the endocrine system dictates the length and depth of the stages of the
life cycle, now known to be under epigenetic control, the unicell
remains in effective synchrony with environmental changes.
4. *TWO ENDS: one for biologists, the other for physicists *
The powerof the cellular-molecular approach has revealed itself by
gaining insight to the long-sought mechanistic relationship between
physics and biology. As mentioned above, the reduction of lung evolution
to the unicellular state was a consequence of the realization that the
adaptation to varying levels of oxygen in the atmosphere was
accommodated by the physical chemistry of the cell, initially by the
insertion of cholesterol into the cell membrane of unicellular
eukaryotes, our forebears, and subsequently through cell-cell
interactions that mediate the production of lung surfactant, the evolved
functional state of cholesterol in the gas-exchanger of multicellular
organisms.
As a result of the internal consistency of the cellular molecular
mechanisms that mediate gas-exchange by the lung, both developmentally
and phylogenetically, the mechanistic basis for the well-recognized
pre-adaptations/exaptations were traced back to the novel concept for
The First Principles of Physiology in the protocell. The utilization of
cholesterol delivered by the frozen snowball asteroids that pelted the
atmosphereless Earth to form the oceans spontaneously formed micelles,
primitive cell-like spheres composed of semipermeable lipid membranes.
Insight to that mechanism was derived from the synthesis of cholesterol
when the oxygen levels on Earth were great enough to provide the 11
atoms of oxygen needed to synthesize one molecule of cholesterol. Or
what the discoverer of the cholesterol synthetic pathway, Konrad Bloch,
referred to as a ‘molecular fossil’. Importantly, lipids also exhibit
hysteresis, or ‘molecular memory’, which is essential for evolution so
that the organism ‘remembers’ its biologic past in order to mount a
response to environmental stress.
With the assembly of these ‘pieces’ of the evolutionary puzzle, it was
realized that there were homologies between The First Principles of
Physiology and Quantum Mechanics. The Pauli Exclusion Principle is
homologous with the First Principles of Physiology; the ambiguity
generated by the micelle, with its internal negative entropy and
external positive entropy accommodated the Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle; and the non-localization of particles in the Cosmos is
homologous with the pleiotropic distribution of genes within the
organism, as is the formation of electrochemical fields due to the
coherence of calcium waves resulting from the pleiotropic distribution
of genes*^9 *. **
The basis for the interrelationships between physics and biology are
likely due to their common origins in the Singularity/Big Bang, forming
the Cosmos, and in the process generating the recoil due to Newton’s
Third Law of Motion, i.e. that every action has an equal and opposite
reaction. In the case of physics, the recoil of the Big Bang gave rise
to balanced chemical reactions, whereas in the case of biology it
fostered the self-referential, self-organizational basis for the cell.
Thus, there is a mechanistically-based continuum encompassing the
Singularity/Big Bang, physics and biology, the aggregate of which is
what we think of as consciousness.
**
*References Cited***
1. Smocovitis V. Unifying Biology. Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1996.
**
2. Torday JS, Rehan VK. Developmental cell/molecular biologic approach
to the etiology and treatment of bronchopulmonary dysplasia. Pediatr
Res. 2007 Jul;62(1):2-7.**
**
3. Torday JS, Rehan VK. The evolutionary continuum from lung
development to homeostasis and repair. Am J Physiol Lung Cell Mol
Physiol. 2007 Mar;292(3):L608-11.**
**
4. Rehan VK, Liu J, Sakurai R, Torday JS. Perinatal nicotine-induced
transgenerational asthma. Am J Physiol Lung Cell Mol Physiol. 2013
Oct 1;305(7):L501-7.**
**
5. Torday JS, Rehan VK. Evolutionary Biology, Cell-Cell Communication
and Complex Disease. Wiley, 2012.**
**
6. Torday JS. A central theory of biology. Med Hypotheses. 2015
Jul;85(1):49-57.**
**
7. Vicente, C. An interview with Lewis Wolpert. Development 2015 Aug
1;142(15):2547-8.**
**
8. Jacob, F. Evolution and tinkering. Science 1977 **Jun
10;196(4295):1161-6.**
**
9. Torday JS. Quantum mechanics predicts evolutionary biology. Progr
Biophys Mol Biol (in press).**
--
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Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta 0
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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