Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (32 page)

1
. A. V. Lapo,
Traces of Bygone Biospheres,
translated by V. Purto (Moscow: Mir, 1982). See also “Mining Nickel the Easy Way,”
New Scientist,
March 16, 1972, 583.

1
. Arthur Koestler,
The Ghost in the Machine
(Washington, D.C.: Henry Regnery, 1971), 158.

2
. Robert Rosen,
Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

3
. Carl Sagan,
The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective
(New York: Dell, 1975), 150.

4
. “Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist,” quipped the British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane. “He cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.” Aware of the problem, the evolutionist Ernst Mayr divided purpose into three kinds: “teleomatic,” which refers to “end-producing” forces like gravity, which brings a marble rolling in a bowl until it wobbles to a stop in a concave depression; “teleonomy,” which refers to “end-directed” processes produced by natural selection, like the heart, which acts to pump blood; and “teleology” proper, which for Mayr is conscious and willful. Mayr took the middle term
teleonomic,
from Colin Pittendrigh, who wrote back to him in 1970: “You ask about the word ‘teleonomy.’ You are correct that I did introduce the term into biology and, moreover, I invented it. . . . Organization is more than mere order; order lacks end-directedness; organization is end-directed. . . . The most general of all biological ‘ends, or ‘purposes’ is of course perpetuation by reproduction.” This is incorrect, however, as thermodynamic equilibrium, which metabolism, growth, and reproduction perpetuate, is more general. In 1982 the historian of science David Hull wrote, “Today the mistress has become a lawfully wedded wife. Biologists no longer feel obligated to apologize for their use of teleological language. . . . The only concession which they make to its disreputable past is to rename it ‘teleonomy.’” In retrospect the taboo against purpose was an allergic reaction against the faintest whiff of Aristotelian teleology, which was conflated by the church with a humanlike God. But it is unwarranted. Natural complex systems are cyclical, so they can be their own purposes. But beyond maintenance and reproduction is the tendency toward equilibrium. The organization and selves of self-organizing systems do not exist without the “push” coming from the telic tendencies described in the second law. And that’s no BS.

5
. Sze Zeng, “Who Is Stanley N. Salthe; What Did He Do and Say?”
http://szezeng.blogspot.com/2010/11/who-is-stanley-n-salthe-what-did-he-do.html
(accessed October 28, 2012).

1
. For example, the last two sentences of
On the Origin of Species
in the second through sixth and last editions: “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

2
. Galileo Galilei,
Il Saggiatore
(Rome, 1623); Galilei,
The Assayer
, translated by Drake Stillman and C. D. O’Malley, in
The Controversy on the Comets of 1618
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960).

3
. Galileo Galilei,
Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems
(1632), 87–88; Italo Calvino,
Why Read the Classics?
(New York: Pantheon, 1999), 199.

4
. David Bohm,
On Creativity
(New York: Routledge, 2004).

5
. James A. Shapiro, “What Is the Key to a Realistic Theory of Evolution?” Huffington Post,
www.huffingtonpost.com/james-a-shapiro/what-is-the-key-to-a-real_b_1280685.html?ref=science
(accessed February 19, 2012).

6
. Jerry Coyne, “A Colleague Wrongfully Disses Modern Evolutionary Theory,” Why Evolution Is True, 2012,
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/a-colleague-wrongfully-disses-modern-evolutionary-theory/
(accessed February 19, 2012).

7
. Lingua Franca,
The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy
(Lincoln, Neb.: Bison Books, 2000).

8
. As attested to when, in the late 1890s, the minister of posts and telegraphs, to whom he applied for funding, did not answer him but wrote “to the Longara”—which was the name of the insane asylum in Rome—on his application.

9
. Ludwik Fleck,
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Fleck (1896–1961) wrote this book before the better-known meditations on the making of science facts by Thomas Kuhn, who acknowledged his debt to Fleck.

10
. Lynn Margulis, “Origin of Evolutionary Novelty by Symbiogenesis,” in
Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories: A Critical Appraisal of 150 Years after “The Origin of Species,
” edited by G. Auletta, M. Leclerc, and R. A. Martinez (Rome: Gregorian and Biblical Press, Piazza della Pilotta, 2011), 107–16. See also “The Human Is More Than Human,”
chapter 1
of this volume.

11
. Jerry Coyne, “Lynn Margulis Disses Evolution in Discover Magazine, Embarrasses Both Herself and the Field,” Why Evolution Is True, 2011,
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/lynn-margulis-disses-evolution-in-discover-magazine-embarrasses-both-herself-and-the-field/
(accessed December 5, 2012).

12
. “Coauthorial Critique” of
Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species
(Cary, N.C.: Basic Books, 2002),
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2VM3EHYAOYP2D
.

13
. Karl Popper,
Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography
(La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing, 1982), 33–34.

14
. J. Marvin Herndon,
Indivisible Earth: Consequences of Earth’s Early Formation as a Jupiter-Like Gas Giant
(Cary, N.C.: Thinker Media, 2012); Herndon,
Origin of the Geomagnetic Field: Consequence of Earth’s Early Formation as a Jupiter-Like Gas Giant
(Cary, N.C.: Thinker Media, 2012); Herndon,
Beyond Plate Tectonics: Consequence of Earth’s Early Formation as a Jupiter-Like Gas Giant
(Cary, N.C.: Thinker Media, 2012).

15
. Herndon,
Indivisible Earth
; Herndon,
Origin of the Geomagnetic Field.

16
. The Kamland Collaboration, “Partial Radiogenic Heat Model for Earth Revealed by Geoneutrino Measurements,”
Nature Geoscience
, July 17, 2011,
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n9/full/ngeo1205.html
.

17
. J. Marvin Herndon, “Corruption of Science in America,”
Dot Connector Magazine
2, no. 14 (2011): 23–30.

18
. See, for example,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwgmzbnckII&feature=related
, which has been criticized as AIDS denialism; but remember questioning the HIV-AIDs connection is not the same thing as denying AIDS; see also the WikiLeaks cable from 2009 from the Office of the Secretary of the State of the United States that HIV infection is “not a communicable disease that is of significant public health risk”:
http://truthbarrier.com/2012/03/14/wikileaks-cable-us-gov-ceases-hiv-testing-visa-applicants-and-calls-hiv-infection-not-a-communicable-disease-that-is-of-significant-public-health-risk/
. Contributing to P. Z. Myers’s “Pharyngula” blog in 2007, Lynn Margulis wrote: “Peter Duesberg is a fine scientist, I have read his book and examined some of the scientific papers upon which it is based. From the CDC (Center for Disease Control) in Atlanta I have requested the scientific papers that prove the causal relationship between the HIV retrovirus and the IMMUNODEFICIENCY SYNDROME commonly known as AIDS. They have never sent even references to the peer-reviewed primary scientific literature that establishes the causal relationship because they can’t. Such papers do not exist. I have seen all four of the films made by Coleman Jones and colleagues in Toronto. Film #3 in the series is most telling. Although no strong evidence exists for any simple causal relationship what is clear is that the HIV claim is erroneous by the standards of microbiology and virology. . . . I heard a talk by a ‘medical scientist’ from the Harvard Medical School at a meeting at Roger Williams Univ in Rhode Island . . . who attempts to design an HIV vaccine. He claimed the HIV virus mutates a billion times in 48 hours. It became clear that the HIV virus has no clear identity. . . . One can be more honest if the earliest stages of evolution are the objects of study. And this way I can lay low and not be ‘name-called’ (i.e., ‘denialist’) because I ask hard questions and require solid evidence before I embrace a particular causal hypothesis. Indeed, is not my attitude of inquiry exactly what science is about?” (
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/03/12/lynn-margulis-blog-tour/
).

19
. Guy Gugliotta, “Is Earth’s Core a Nuclear Fission Reactor?”
Washington Post,
March 24, 2003, 6.

20
. “Science Guardian: Paradigms and Power in Science and Society,”
http://www.scienceguardian.com/blog/
.

21
. Kamland Collaboration, “Partial Radiogenic Heat Model for Earth.”

22
. Frank P. Ryan,
The Mystery of Metamorphosis: A Scientific Detective Story
(White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2011); see also Ryan, “Metamorphosis: Nature’s Most Transformative Process May Also Be an Unsung Force for Evolution,”
New Scientist,
September 2011, 56–59.

23
. Sonya E. Vickers and Donald I. Williamson, “Interspecies Hybrids,” in Margulis, Asikainen, and Krumbein,
Chimeras and Consciousness,
183–97; Donald I. Williamson and S. E. Vickers, “The Origin of Larvae,”
American Scientist,
November–December 2007, 509–17.

24
. The National Academy of Sciences rescinded this member privilege shortly thereafter. Members can no longer bypass editorial procedure to bring what they in their elected expertise think may be important overlooked contributions directly to their peers’ attention.

1
. Empedocles,
Physics
, bk. 2, pt. 8.

2
. Lynn Margulis, “Jointed Threads,”
Natural History,
June 2005, 28–32.

3
.
Science News,
March 30, 2002,
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/access/id/24828
.

4
. For three domains, see, for example, “Towards a Natural System of Organisms: Proposal for the Domains Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
87 (1990): 4576–79. For Margulis’s response to Woese’s proposed phylogeny, see Lynn Margulis and Ricardo Guerrero, “Kingdoms in Turmoil,”
New Scientist,
March 1991, 46–50. For five kingdoms together with three domains, see Lynn Margulis and Michael J. Chapman,
Kingdoms and Domains: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth
(New York: Elsevier/Academic Press, 2009). For a popular account, see William Brown, “A New Tree of Life Takes Root,”
New Scientist,
August 11, 1990, 18.

5
. The acceptance of symbiosis as a scientific fact of life has been championed in the previous century by Lynn Margulis: for details, see her
Symbiosis in Cell Evolution
(San Francisco: Freeman, 1982). A less technical narrative is presented in her
Early Life
(Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1982). Margulis has demarginalized symbiosis theory, and the endosymbiotic origins of the eukaryotic cell are now presented as fact in many secondary- and college-level biology texts. Nonetheless, the theory of the origin of nucleated (eukaryotic) cells by symbiosis has been around for a century. For a history, see Jan Sapp,
Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

6
. An ugly term, which sounds almost proctological, the term
protoctists
was coined in 1830 by the English naturalist John Hogg—the unenviability of whose own surname is suggested by the changing of the name of the Bahamas Hog Island to Paradise Island. While of little medical importance, protoctists are important both ecologically and evolutionarily: it is in this group of some thirty thousand species that plants, animals, and fungi evolved.

7
. Michael W. Gray and W. Ford Doolittle, “Has the Endosymbiotic Theory Been Proven?”
Microbiological Reviews
46 (1082): 1–42. See also John L. Hall and D. J. Luck, “Basal Body-Associated DNA:
In Situ
Studies in
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii,
”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
92 (1995): 5129–33; and, more recently, Hall, “Spirochete Contributions to the Eukaryotic Genome,”
Symbiosis
54 (2011): 119–29. As the symbiosis historian Jan Sapp underscores in “Freewheeling Centrioles,”
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
20 (1998): 255–90, one of the lessons of Hall’s work is that cell structures do not have to have nucleic acids in order to be inherited. The study of nongenetic inheritance, epigenetics, has become a hot topic of active research in the years since I wrote this essay. “The classic example is the Dutch famine of World War II,” writes Oded Rechavi. “Starving mothers who gave birth during the famine had children who were more susceptible to obesity and other metabolic disorders—and so were their grandchildren.” A study in rats showed that chronic high-fat diets in fathers result in obesity in their daughters. Rechavi is author of a paper showing that acquired traits can be inherited without DNA via small RNAs: Oded Rechavi, Gregory Minevich, and Oliver Hobert, “Transgenerational Inheritance of an Acquired Small RNA-Based Antiviral Response,” in
C. elegans, Cell,
November 23, 2011, 1248–56.

8
. Most evolutionary narratives are like mystery novels that leave out the beginning of the story. A popular account that does not make short shrift of the first three billion years of evolution is Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan,
Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution
(New York: Touchstone, 1991). See also A. Knoll,
Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).

9
. Best in the sense of ideal not most well. Unlike Hogg’s less-than-mellifluous coinage, undulipodia seems an adequate, even euphonious word. From the Latin
undulatus,
“wavy,” from the diminutive
undula,
“wavelet” “little wave,” ultimately from
unda,
“wave,” undulipodia refers to the waving appendages, be they cilia, sperm tails, or the cell whips of motile
Euglena
swimmers with the green solar eyes of their plastids. In an e-mail of January 19, 2012, F. J. R. “Max” Taylor, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an expert in symbiosis who coined the term
serial endosymbiosis theory,
told me, in the course of a discussion about how even he couldn’t sign on to the spirochete idea, why he was reluctant to use the term
undulipodia
: “As I tried to make clear (and so did she) the symbiotic origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts proposals are old and gained acceptance as a result, not only of very strong structural and metabolic similarities with free living prokaryotes but, in particular, the fact that they are separated from the ‘host’ cytoplasm by their own membrane compartments and the presence of their own DNA inside them—I note that Lynn was one of the first to discover the latter in chloroplasts. Unfortunately, these are key features lacking in the basal bodies of flagella and cilia. Lynn would argue that this is because they became incorporated earlier but it would have helped her hypothesis if it was otherwise. Unfortunately I couldn’t agree with her about restricting the term ‘flagella’ to bacteria since this is historically backwards—the name was not used for bacteria until nearly a century after it had been coined for eukaryotes (and I really disliked ‘undulipodia’).” It is perhaps ironic that the same general conservativism that leads life to preserve its form across the generations, and thus leave traces of its multibillion-year trajectory in the fossil record, also makes it, in the human linguistic realm, slow to adopt more accurate vocabulary terms. So it is that we say sunrise rather than, say, terraturn, or speak of dialing a phone when dials have long since been replaced by buttons and touch screens. The question is more than nomenclatural because of the size difference, distinctive ultrastructure, and the many more proteins found in the eukaryotic structures: some distinct word or sign, if not the six-syllable candidate in question, should be in use, if only for the sake of descriptive clarity among medical students and possible future researchers.

The plot thickens as Margulis also argued for a spirochete role in AIDS. Rather scandalously, soon after the announcement of the discovery of HIV as a cause of AIDS, reports of death by syphilis became conspicuously absent and was even remarked on by the British government. According to the independent researcher John Scythes, who has no institutional affiliations or axes to grind, but who has lost many friends to AIDs, syphilis remains a strong candidate for cofactor in the causation of symptoms attributed to HIV. A key datum is the immunocryptic abilities of syphilis spirochetes resistant to antibiotics. It may seem like a Lilliputian Freudian fantasy, but spirochetes really are the fastest beings in the microcosm, able to swim through viscous medium via a corkscrew movement that often lands them in the vicinity of food or other desirable gradients (light, heat, oxygen, anoxic environments) faster than their more sessile cousins; in termite hindguts they coordinate their undulations in waves; and they also not only feed on the periphery and inside the cell walls of “host” cells but also, remarkably, form permanent “holdfasts,” permanently attaching to other cells, as in the notorious case, already mentioned, of
Mixotricha paradoxa,
a nanosphinx that has not only propulsive spirochetes attached to it but also congenital undulipodia, as well as at least two other permanently adopted bacterial genomes. With such witnessed behavior and morphologies, a minute sample of the vast earthly experiment of microbial evolution one must take seriously the proposal of an evolutionary spirochetosis at the base of the eukaryotic lineage.

As the theorized oldest partner in SET, serial endosymbiosis theory, anaerobic spirochetes may have merged with archaea millions of years before the addition of the ancestors to mitochondria or chloroplasts. And unlike those, theoretically more recent additions, the speedy spirochetes (their litheness and rapidity upping their chances for mergers) are both aerobic and anaerobic. Given the unsettled etiological and epistemological questions, and the ulterior motives of corporate profit, as well as the syphilis spirochete
Treponema pallidum
’s pre-AIDS notoriety as a or even “the great imitator,” as chronicled in many old medical texts, that is a hardy slow killer able to simulate many other diseases (symptoms that may have largely overlapped with those of AIDS), the serious question arises as to whether, and if so, how,
T. pallidum,
known for its ability to go into hiding by forming immunologically indetectable “round bodies,” is not itself (still) overwhelming human immune systems. To this end, as Scythes points out, it is good that syphilis, even if it is not admitted to be a possible cause or the cause of AIDS, is again becoming the subject of tests among AIDS patients. Considering that spirochetes have survived symbiotically as well as pathologically on Earth for well over three billion years, having survived all the major mass extinctions without missing a beat, it seems to me medically irresponsible not to carefully investigate, as Scythes advocates, their possible role as a cofactor of AIDS.

10
. Georges Bataille’s “general economy” and his constant reflections on the Sun are deeply influenced by Vladimir I. Vernadsky: see
Consumption,
volume 1 of
The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy
(New York: Zone Books, 1988), especially 29 and 192, where Vernadsky is explicitly referred to. For Vernadsky in English, see his
The Biosphere
(Oracle, Ariz.: Synergetic, 1986), a much-abbreviated and perhaps unreliable “abridged version based on the French edition of 1929,” and the more recent and comprehensive
The Biosphere: Complete Annotated Edition
(New Yorker: Springer, 1998). The new uses found for the excess materials produced in the wake of life’s growth is a leitmotif of natural history. The wastes for which uses are found (e.g., oil deposits, calcium exudates, oxygen flatulence) produce, in turn, new wastes of their own. Pollution is not new, nor can it be attributed to the development of technology unless by technology we include nonhuman life-forms, among them bacteria. For further details on the uses to which wastes generated by rampant growths were put previously, see Margulis and Sagan,
Microcosmos,
pages 99–114 (for oxygen), 184–87 (for calcium), and 237 (for environmental crises in general).

11
. For a meditation on the relation between spirochete microbial ecology and human thought, see Margulis’s “Speculation on Speculation,” in Margulis and Sagan,
Dazzle Gradually,
48–56; and Margulis and Sagan,
Microcosmos,
137–54.

12
. See, for example, Dorion Sagan and Jessica Whiteside, “Medical Symbiotics,” in Margulis, Asikainen, and Krumbein,
Chimeras and Consciousness,
207–18. For new views of the immune system, see, for example, Gerard Eberl, “A New Vision of Immunity: Homeostasis of the Superorganism,”
Mucosal Immunology
3, no. 5 (2010): 450–60; and the review article by Yun Kyung Lee and Sarkis K. Mazmanian, “Has the Microbiota Played a Critical Role in the Evolution of the Adaptive Immune System?”
Science
330 (2010): 1768–73.

13
. Interview with Anthony Burgess, “Writers at Work,” in
The Paris Review Interviews,
edited by George Plimpton, 4th ser. (New York: Penguin, 1976), 340–41.

14
. The idea of a living Earth is not new: “Plato thought the world to be a living being and in
The Laws
(898) stated that the planets and stars were living as well. . . . During the Renaissance, the idea of Heaven as an animal reappeared in Lucillo Vanini; the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino spoke of the hair, teeth and bones of the earth; and Giordano Bruno felt that the planets were great peaceful animals, warm-blooded, with regular habits and endowed with reason. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler debated with the English mystic Robert Fludd which of them had first conceived the notion of the earth as a living monster, ‘whose whale like breathing, changing with sleep and wakefulenss, produces the ebb and flow of the sea.’ The anatomy, the feeding habits, the colour, the memory and the imaginative and shaping faculties of the monster were sedulously studied by Kepler” (Jorge Luis Borges,
The Book of Imaginary Beings
[New York: Penguin, 1980], 21–22).

15
. For Gaia theory as unscientific, see, for example, Heinrich Holland,
The Chemical Evolution of the Atmosphere and Oceans
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984); W. Ford Doolittle, “Is Nature Really Motherly?”
CoEvolution Quarterly
29 (1981): 58–65; and R. Dawkins,
The Extended Phenotype
(Oxford: Freeman, 1982). For Gaia theory as trivial, see J. W. Kirchner, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Can It Be Tested?”
Review of Geophysics
27 (1989): 223–35. For “Satanism,” see Carol White, “Mother Earth Marries Satan,”
Twenty-First Century Science and Technology,
September–October 1989, 52–53.

16
. Cited in James E. Lovelock,
The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth
(New York: Norton, 1988). The astronaut gazes at the baby-blue, cloud-flecked planet from which she or he is now separated. Earth, spoken of anemically in textbooks as lifeless, a mere geochemical setting for life, no longer appears as mere environment. It mutates from being the home of an ecology or ecofeminism and becomes a giant spherical being. For astronaut accounts, see Frank White,
The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).