How can Richard Dawkins’ insights on genetic activity reflect Teilhard’s insights into evolution?
Today’s Post
Last week we began out look at how three of the insights of Richard Dawkins into human evolution can be seen to have nuggets of thought that resonate with Teilhard, starting with the idea that evolution is the underlying phenomenon by which the universe comes to be.
This week, we will look at the second of his insights into evolution, that of the essential contribution of the amazing molecule, the gene, to the continuation of evolution on our planet.
Dawkins and ‘Pre-Biological’ Evolution
While Dawkins does not explicitly open the idea of evolution as a satisfactory term to describe the development of the universe from the big bang to the human, he opens this door by addressing evolution before the advent of biological life. In his book, “The Selfish Gene”, He describes in great detail how biological evolution is made possible by the ‘gene’.
In the 1940s and early 1950s, experiments pointed to DNA as the portion of chromosomes that held genes. A focus on new model organisms such as viruses and bacteria, along with the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953, marked the transition to the era of molecular genetics, a subject in which Dawkins is considered most proficient.
Genes are pieces of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) inside each cell that tell the cell what to do and when to grow and divide. Each gene is made up of a specific DNA sequence that contains the code (the instructions) to make a certain protein, each of which has a specific job or function in the body.
Dawkins, however, takes a closer look at the relation between genes and Natural Selection (NS). He points out that genes do not themselves evolve by NS. NS requires genes to be active in the cellular structure before ‘selection’ can take place.
“Darwinian selection does not work on genes directly. DNA is cocooned in protein, swaddled in membranes, shielded from the world, and invisible to natural selection. If selection tried to choose DNA molecules directly, it would hardly find any criterion by which to do so. All genes look alike, just as all recording tapes look alike. The important differences between genes emerge only in their effects (cells)”.
He makes the distinction that while biological species evolve, genetic components replicate. The transition to the increase of the diversity addressed by NS requires the cell.
The gene itself, in comparison to its component parts, is incredibly complex. Its complexity is not limited to its size, but also to its function. Dawkins sees the gene as the first element in evolution to be able to replicate itself. This replication process itself is itself quite complex, as the gene’s ability to guide the work of RNA to build proteins not only ‘encodes’ the proteins that result, but as well the creation of the enzymes that build the cells, instruct their growth and guide their divisions and interactions with other cells.
In this model, the DNA molecule can be seen as the master software ‘app’ which feeds instructions to lesser ‘apps’ which perform the construction and management of those of the cell itself.
This raises the question: how did the evolutionary product of the molecule get from the earliest known structure of helium hydride, thought to emerge very early in the evolution of the universe, to the incredibly complex molecule of DNA? Even more importantly, how did the evolutionary process of connecting elements to make newer and more complex ones become a process in which elements become able to replicate themselves? Dawkins does not address this per se but makes the assumption that the basic function of replication is fully in place before the process of biological evolution can begin. He opens the door to understanding an evolutionary process that eventually produces the level of complexity required by the gene. His theory requires a complex precursor to the gene.
Of course, the replication function itself is somewhat iffy. Were it not so, the same genome would be simply be endlessly identically replicated, and none of the diversity that is clearly in evidence today would be possible. Such diversity that results from random changes to the genetic content obviously leads to the diversity of cellular structures, and further leads to the ramification of biological species addressed by Natural Selection. As Dawkins sees it, what is referred to as ‘genetic evolution’ is simply the effective ‘selection’ of certain genes which ‘survive’ in their cellular ‘vehicles’.
Next Week
This week we took an initial look into the insights of Richard Dawkins on the role of the gene in biological evolution, and how, by differentiating the two distinct steps of replication and selection, he opens the door to a backwards look at the process of molecular evolution proceeding that of Science’s Natural Selection.
Next week we will look a little deeper into the relationship between these two processes, and how in doing so Teilhard’s vision of how the energy of evolution flows into the development of living things can be seen.