By: Arjun Makhijani
A report of The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
The Apex Press | (c) 2001 by Arjun Makhijani and The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research | All rights reserved
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Chapter 1: The Ecosystem in Us >
Chapter 2: Incorporation and Excorporation
Chapter 3: Modes of Expression
Chapter 4: Reproduction of the Ecosystem
Chapter 5: Genetic Engineering and the Environment
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CHAPTER 1: The Ecosystem in UsAs the jaguar searches the forest for prey at dusk, her spots camouflage her well. This commonplace of evolutionary adaptation hides a crucial question. How do the light and dark patterns of the forest transform themselves into the coat of the jaguar? The development of patterns of spots by retention of genetic mutations suited for survival may explain how evolutionary change occurs, but it provides no clue as to genetic structure itself.1 Consider another example from a myriad that could be put forth. The baby crocodile, recently emerged from its egg, lunges out of the water and accurately snaps up an insect. But it will not touch one that is immobile on the water surface or one that has already drowned and is sinking to the bottom.2 How did the hatchling crocodile "know"-in the sense of instinctual grasping of the essence of external reality- from the moment of birth that live insects are food or that drowned dead ones sink and should be left alone? One may pose the question differently. What is the correspondence between the internal biological structure and the external world and how is it expressed?
The actions that a living being performs for survival (such as eating, breathing, excretion, reproduction, flight from danger, and, in many species, nurture) necessarily relate that living being to its environment. There is, therefore, an internal biological structure that enables each living being to carry out just those activities (though with variations in efficacy). Picking up scents, seeing, leaping and grabbing the insect prey, fleeing from the predator, reproducing- none of these actions could possibly occur unless the internal biological systems of the various living beings were constructed so as to respond systematically to external events or to initiate them. To return to the first example, the coat of the jaguar results from the internal reproductive system of the species. Indeed, coat pigmentation patterns arise directly from the genetic make-up of the jaguar. One may conclude, therefore, that one aspect of the jaguar's genetic structure is that it is a specific biological expression of the patterns of light and dark in the forest (integrated over time). In this sense the structure of the jaguar's genome contains particulars about its environment in forms that enable it and the species to survive.3 The second example shows a somewhat different aspect of genome-ecosystem relationship. In this case, the communication of the particulars of the insect to the crocodile is mediated by the environment, which is external to both. The recognition by the crocodile of the insect as food comes via the sounds, sights, and smells which represent the insect externally to the crocodile. To grasp the insect as food, the crocodile need only integrate the insect's various simultaneous appearances and convert them into an internal signal that food is present. The genetic structure of the crocodile only needs a biological expression of the phenomena, rather than of the insect, as such, in its entirety.4 The common element in both examples is that the external environment needed by a living being has an internal genetic expression. The basic hypothesis about the genetic-environment correspondence is that the genome of any species is the internal biological expression of the ecosystem needed by that species for its existence.5 In other words, the genome of a species has an internal structure that corresponds to the specific ecosystem that it needs to survive both individually and intergenerationally.6 This is not to say that the genome is the exclusive internal expression of the ecosystem. The environment in which the fertilized cell develops and the external environment after the individual is born are also crucial to shaping living beings.7 The first aspect involves the environment prevalent during the process of reproduction. The second is the postnatal aspect, which involves the environment in which individuals conduct the day-to-day business of living. There are large variations in the survival of trees during storms that depend not only on genetic variations between species and within tree species, but also on a host of environmental and developmental factors that characterize the specific history of each tree. But over the long-term, the essentials of day-today living must be expressed in genetic structure. A tree species cannot survive if the range of windspeeds that it would typically experience were not incorporated, through the motions that wind has induced in trees over the ages, into that aspect of its genetic structure that gives its trunk and branches the tensile and shear strength to survive most storms.
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Institute for Energy and Environmental ResearchPosted November 2001
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Endnotes
1 Polanyi has made a similar observation about natural selection. "Natural selection tells us only why the unfit failed to survive and not why any living beings, either fit or unfit, ever came into existence." Polanyi 1958, p. 35. Levins and Lewontin have noted that "Early evolutionists did not take up the problem of the origin of life as a central issue. In The Origin of Species Darwin mentioned the problem only in passing and then metaphorically as the 'primordial form, into which life was first breathed.'" Levins and Lewontin 1985, p. 46. Charles Darwin's own goal was to explain changes and adaptation-that is the origin of species. It was, he wrote, "of the highest importance to gain a clear insight into the means of modification and coadaptation."-Darwin 1998 edition, p. 20. While this essay does not address the origin of life, it takes up the related questions of its nature and structure.2 Davenport et al. 1990.3 I use the term "genome" to mean the full ensemble of material potentially involved in reproductive inheritance. Besides nuclear DNA, this may include DNA found in cytoplasm. The exact nature of this ensemble of material does not affect the broad hypotheses discussed here, though of course, it would affect their further exploration.4 The sexual partner of the insect needs, and has, a more complete internal representation and a more detailed needknowledge of the phenomena.5 The internal genomic expression of the ecosystem that a species needs being is not a "snapshot" of the external ecosystem at any particular time. Moreover, since there is a wide scope for non-genetic adaptation and similar environments in many places, the ecosystem needed by a species as expressed in its genetic structure may be geographically more variable than the specific context of the evolution of that species. See below for further discussion.6 Richard Lewontin has made the following general observation about the relationship between environment and organism: "The environment of an organism is the penumbra of external conditions that are relevant to it because it has effective interactions with those aspects of the outer world." Lewontin 2000, pp. 48-49, (emphasis added).7 Of course, the cellular context of the development of the zygote into an individual is also central. For instance, in the process of cloning the famous sheep Dolly, it was necessary to place the parent nucleus (derived from an udder cell) into an enucleated oöcyte, and not any other cell. Cloning shows the essential role of the cytoplasm of the öocyte in the process of cell differentiation needed for a zygote to become a fully developed individual, at least in mammals. |