CLIMATE CHANGE CHALLENGES EVOLUTION

When “physiologic chemists” talk about buffering, they usually talk about acid-base buffering.  How when “physiologists” talk about buffering they include water electrolyte as well as acid-base buffering. I was introduced to the concept of buffering of a different sort, the holistic notion of buffering of an entire biological system against the inclusive environment.  It was the subject of a book, It Takes a Genome authored by Greg Gibson. The book introduced the concept of how narrow our environment really is in terms of our genes. Natural selection took millions and millions of years to increase our complexity but in the process narrowed our plasticity. That narrowness, complexity, or specialization, is protected by buffering.  I found that fascinating.

The author hypothesized that disease resulted when man made alterations to their environment that exceeds the “buffer capacity” of the body. We do many things to satisfy our physiological needs: when we are cold, we heat our homes, when we are hot; we cool them, when we are hungry, and we eat. However, we have made food so abundant and rich it is killing us. We are using so much energy that we are warming more than just our homes but also we are warming the earth. We have turn evolution on it head; we adapt to the environment for millions and millions of years; however, we suddenly, over a period of a few thousand of years, adapted the environment to our needs. Either we make these adaptations unintentionally or make them with good intentions but in either case, we do them without understanding the consequences. Worse yet, we ignore the consequences even while we are paying the penalties.

I felt the book would be a best seller and would contribute to altering our approach to medicine; that did not happen. Our approach to medicine is changing but it seem like the medical profession is stumbling about in ignorance of this aspect of genetics.  In one sense, the medical profession with all of its many and diverse branches in many but not all cases seem to be trying to modify the genome to fit the new “artificial” environment—some form of matching artificial or pseudo evolution to match the environment. In the process, medical scientists are making great strides in understanding genetics and modalities of treatments as well as producing many of these actual treatments, which are literally pouring out of research laboratories all over the world. Pharmaceutical companies are making “big” money producing “drugs” to counter the damaging results of our post “hunter-gatherer” environment. It is almost like the military industrial complex where the profit motive dominates ratiocination.

The more I thought about what Gibson wrote, the more I thought about how natural selection got us to where we are. As a physiological chemist and a pathologist, I see the world through a different lens; I see life in term of chemistry. Our shape and behavior are manifestations of chemical reactions. I think I know and understand chemical buffering and realize there are finite limitations to buffering. I could understand how Gibson, as a geneticist, saw buffering as a concept in a different way and I understand his Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village” analogy. In either way, the question remained, “How did buffering reactions evolve by natural selection?

Maybe buffering  just exists and did not evolve?” Proteins and enzymes are products of DNA; hence, are subject to natural selection. Are all protein 75,000 enzymes found in biota somehow involved in buffering? How do non-protein catalysts become involved in buffering?  Is the size of the chromosomes including junk DNA somehow limited by buffering? Is our life span no more a result of buffering? If equilibriums are a two way street, “Why can we not de-evolve?” Can we ever regain our plasticity or did we every have plasticity? Can we increase our buffering capacity?

It soon became clear that “natural selection” did not have a time when it started; it always existed. It is not exclusively a biological phenomenon; it also is a chemical phenomenon. In addition, it had no purpose; it is deterministic. People will not accept the word formula but it is true: deterministic = natural selection. Chemical reactions happen because they must. Biological systems have buffering because they must. This also means chemical reactions lack ability to change, which also means some reactions are not in equilibrium; once they happen they can not be reversed; evolution is a one way street. The message is that if we are the result of chemical reactions that have limits; therefore, so do we.  In the biological sense, the expression ‘adaptive evolution’ is nonsense. If chemical reactions happen because they must, then the earth’s biota is “a must”; living things did not adapt to anything they were an uncompromising result of the environment; a huge complex of interacting chemical reactions all in balance with one another; a complex only understandable by reductionism—hard science.

The conclusion I came to while thinking about a prebiotic primordial pool, the same pool people have being speculating existed since developing mentality, is that we exist because we must, just as million of other species exist because they must. We are masses of chemical reactions, all in delicate irreversible equilibrium. Those that did not have sufficient buffering capacity became extinct—our relationship to our environment is so complex it is barely comprehensible. Our equilibrium makes us unique but also it is what makes us susceptible to extinction; if we accept the fact that we cannot change ourselves beyond what a few drugs can do then we must not change our environment beyond what our buffering systems can handle. To do that, we have to stop denying the science.  

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