Evolution Beyond Natural Selection
0618118128
Frank Ryan
Notes
Darwinian selection is based exclusively on the individual’s struggle for survival in competition with others of its own species. Here (in symbiosis) we find a pattern of evolution based on behavioral interactions between entirely different species.
Symbiosis may be useful much of the time, but under certain circumstances can be a burden.
Wallin (1927) believed that symbiosis, and not Darwinian mutation, was the explanation for the origin of species.
“Time is insignificant and never a difficulty for nature. It is always at her disposal and represents an unlimited power with which she accomplishes her greatest and smallest tasks.”
Lamarck
Gaia theory proposed an intrinsic coupling of life with its inanimate environment that in totality was self-regulating.
The most terrible of the extinctions, about 250 million years ago, wiped out 95 percent of the life forms that had struggled into existence over the 300 million years since Snowball Earth. In all, five catastrophes have wiped out more than half of the species existing at the time, and at least ten more have resulted in lesser extinctions. In all these disasters there is a salient message: each resulted in great disruptions of the biosphere, yet in every case equilibrium was eventually restored.
A single paradigm does not rule evolution or any other branch of science. Not only do multiple paradigms apply, they interact from event to event and from moment to moment.
Bacteria are not programmed to die. They will keep on dividing forever unless some outside agency, like a chemical poison or ultraviolet light, destroys their metabolic processes. But meiosis programs all creatures that employ sexual reproduction to die. “Death” as Marguilis graphically expresses it, “is a sexually transmitted disease.”
Together with its symbionts / parasites, we should think of each host as a superorganism with the respective genomes yoked into a chimera of sorts.
If the partner cooperated, the player rewarded him with further cooperation; if the partner cheated, the player punished him in turn by cheating. Grudges were not held. If the cheater reverted to cooperation, the reward aspect kicked in again. This proved to be an extremely powerful mechanism for cooperation.
Symbiosis causes the large leaps in evolution resulting in new species and Darwinism explains the small incremental changes within a species.