Do Pathogens Time Travel?

Evolution arises from a wealth of failure: 1) natural selection requires large and variable populations comprised largely of organisms that fail because their designs do not match their present circumstances and 2) chance destruction occurs at all spatiotemporal scales.

So clearly strict optimization does not reside in the designs, contra religiosos and radical adaptationists alike. Nor does it reside in the process of selection: every species eventually dies out–by maladaptation, stochastic extirpation or an external force (say, a large meteorite in yo’ face).

And yet biological life began early on Earth and continues on, four billion years later, and will do so after the present climate state collapses or we nuke ourselves senseless.

A Visitation of the Influenza

In seeping through the world’s every nook and cranny, pandemics have a way of forcing themselves into our lives as a lurking presence. Even the most insular of functionaries, who typically makes his living solving problems by ignoring them, straightens up and takes notice.

As an epidemic wave arrives, each of us faces intimate decisions we may have thought a concern only for someone somewhere else far, far away. Should my family flee, vaccinate, wear masks, scrub regularly, shun crowds, isolate itself, drink brandy-infused elderberry, or, for the jittery among us, just crawl into bed until 2011? Others, on the other hand, may ask whether we should even bother worrying.

The answers are as variable as the people who arrive at them. Over the past two weeks I’ve heard friends and family heatedly talk through their positions online and in the real world. I’ve overheard strangers in cafes, on buses, and on the street wrestle with what were months ago only abstract possibilities better left to the eggheads.

Heart of Modeling

Greed is often mistaken for humanity’s heart of darkness. Look instead to the rationalization that transforms the most rapacious pillaging into an act of benevolence. A one-ton bomb dropped on a peasant wedding party is dissembled into regret without responsibility or, baser yet, a tough love offered with warning enough its victims, until then on their happiest day, ignored at their own risk.

Massacring the poorest–by the pen or the sword–is abstracted into an industrial deduction no rough facts can peel back. In its desperate flight free, what evidence flutters out from between the secret policeman’s gloves serves in this framework as its own denunciation: the editor who publishes it loses his job, the journalist her access, and the whistleblower his freedom. Barbarism, backed by Ivy League pedigrees and the strategic brick of cash, can excuse itself with the right mix of red tape and inert banality.

The shock for some will be that even evolutionary biology plays its part. Set aside its more blatant frauds writing how the dead were inherently dumber than those who designed the bomb that killed them. As if even true it was alibi enough. In their unrequited loyalties the likes of Phil Rushton and Charles Murray speak as if they are somehow affiliated with the physics that went into the ordnance. No Einsteins these, the hangers-on refute themselves as soon as they open their mouths.

Darwin’s Simulacrum

I see dead people. And you can too. The museums are full of them, reanimated in a shamanistic glow funded by real estate developer Jack Rudin or Target or whichever oligarchical consortium rules your city state.

When we visit the clearing in the gentrified jungle we hope we might at least be blessed with a vision of an ancestral shade nominally more illuminating than what’s projected by the man behind the tree line.

Three years ago I attended the Charles Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In a country where 40% of the population polled think evolution patently false and another 20% are unsure, the show proved a triumph. Despite friends’ complaints about its length, the exhibit, expertly curated by Niles Eldredge of punctuated equilibrium fame, encapsulated Darwin, his ideas, and many of their immediate implications in an easily understandable way.

There I was–cynic turned fetishist–thrilled to see Darwin’s pistol and Bible from his circumnavigation aboard HMS Beagle. Although he spent considerable time ashore, there is great appeal in summoning a young Darwin, before his health broke, astride a deck hauling himself from one intellectual port to another, from amateur enthusiast to professional naturalist. He had much help, of course, but on an autodidact’s schedule, at one and the same time a relaxed and fevered pace. In an irony still relevant today, his successes would render him the last of the artisan naturalists.

From Holling to Darwin to Gould

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th of the publication of The Origin of Species. Natural selection has had a fundamental impact on the way we view the evolution of pathogens and their geographies of spread. In Farming Human Pathogens we attempt to better wed Darwin’s contribution to more recent work on the dynamics of ecosystems.

Views of Evolution

Darwin was a gradualist who believed that selection on small variations conferred small improvements in fitness. He largely discounted the influence of climate and believed that the relationships between species of an ecosystem drove natural selection. However, in his time catastrophists were prominent, especially among the geologists, who believed that catastrophic events winnowed out species. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, Darwin’s advances came only by way of ignoring the data catastrophists had until then accumulated.

Reverend, Save Thyself

The following letter to the editor was submitted in response to a previously printed letter.

To the Editor,

The Rev. Arnold Lemke published a letter (March 4, Star-Tribune, West Extra) ridiculing Darwinian science as a faith-based initiative. He argued recent science has disproved Darwin and his present-day adherents are left with little but their faith in the man’s ideas.

But the Reverend violated a core ethos of his calling: Thou shalt not bear false witness. He so mischaracterizes Darwin and the nature of science as to remind us all why churches no longer set school standards.

• Contrary to the Reverend’s contention, there is considerable scientific evidence life emerged via abiogenesis. Stanley Miller devised lab experiments that recreated some of the basic abiotic conditions of early Earth, including an atmosphere of methane, hydrogen, ammonia and water. Miller showed that when exposed to an energy source such as ultraviolet radiation, these compounds could react to produce amino acids essential for the formation of living matter. Sidney Fox later demonstrated amino acids could spontaneously form small peptides, which in turn could form closed spherical membranes comparable to replicable cells. 

Darwin and Marx: A Clarification

In a quickie interview for Mount Holyoke’s house organ on the occasion of Charles Darwin’s two hundredth birthday and the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, biologist Stan Rachootin characterized the roots of the academic left’s hostility with Darwin,

Marx realized the close connection between Darwin’s thinking and capitalism. Therefore, Darwin had to be wrong. Engels, who was willing to read and use science, tried to argue that Darwin had a great deal of evidence beyond some ideas shared with Malthus and Adam Smith. But he could not budge his master.

Rachootin botches Marx’s reaction to Darwin. Badly.

Marx and Engels—the former in no way the latter’s “master”, an ad hominem attack on Rachootin’s part—reacted to the publication of the Origin of Species with something approaching glee. While contrary to an oft-repeated myth Marx never dedicated Capital to Darwin, he did write of his great appreciation of what he called Darwin’s “epoch-making work” and “the basis in natural history for our view.”