Over a period of over 120 years, Darwin carefully evaluated and reevaluated all the information he had at his disposal in the years leading up to 1859 and developed and carefully side stepping pressure from creationists published a theory in the form of, The Origin of Species through Natural Selection. Herbert Spencer, a philosopher, soon reduced it to a spicy “survival of the fittest”, a laconic phrase that has stuck with us from that time. As a biochemist, more accurately a physiological chemist, I soon realized that to confine his ideas to the narrow concept of the origin of species to morphological entities was wrong. As an after retirement hobby, something to think about, I struggled with the question of how did biogenesis all come about. The subject is immense, ranging from cosmos chemistry to the study of culture; from the sun, moon, and star to the origin of species, to the way we behave. What surprised me was to find that the concept of “survival of the fittest” was a principle transcending all disciplines ranging from physics to sociobiology. E. O. Wilson, an outstanding biologist, researcher, and naturalist, summarized this in the title of one of his many books, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998). The thrust of this book was to unite “science with humanities with the aim of the synthesis of knowledge of “different” specialized fields of human endeavor”.
In my opinion, the restrictions imposed by him, and related to the narrowness of science in the culture of 30 years ago, cause the concept to fall short in terms of what it should include. This was also true of the pressures society imposed on Darwin 155 years ago. In Darwin’s day, it was ubiquitous power of the church that stood ominously over achievement. In contrast, in the more recent times of Wilson, other scientists were protecting their narrow domains. For example, the idea he expressed as to uniting humanities with science implies that humanities are not science. That aside, the word ‘science’ in his concept of consilience, we should expanded to include all areas of physics and chemistry as well as all areas of biology and social biology. Obviously, Wilson whose specialty is myrmecology, or the study of ants, was aware of the intricacies of social structure found in diverse swarming species of this insect, which made him acutely aware of inherited behavior. Although, not originating with him, evolutionary psychology, which he defined as the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior and as the extension of population biology, was born out of that era.
Therefore, we cannot explain how we end up with a walking, talking, thinking, and socializing man from the big bang without following a continuous uninterrupted track of both morphology and behavior and we cannot follow that track from that hot plasma through particle physics to water and oxygen to the complex metabolism of man. All of science would be hopelessly lost unless we follow the “survival of the fittest” inspired by Darwinian, which he derive from his intense study of fossil morphologic and behavior of living things—all living things—from around the world. Thus, his concept was born out biology and gave rise to evolution theory but can be expanded to apply to chemical reactions associated with living things—the evolution of chemical reactions before there were living things to evolve. What is shocking in the evolution of chemical reactions is the time line related to the “concept of trial and error”. In living things, a random mutation resulting in an adaption to the environment, for example, happens to an organism in a population of those same organisms, thus, the mutated organism is viewed as being in competition with it fellow organism. Given time, if the new adaptation, no matter what it is, enables that organism to survive better or if it does no harm, that modified organism out competes it neighbors and subsequently replaces them; if that happens, it is, in the shades of Darwin, more “fit to survive” in that environment. By far, most modifications do not benefit an established organism but actually harm survival, which usually does not take many trail and error generations before they are lost. Trial and error takes time generally related to life cycle generation times; a man’s generation time is something like 20 years, while a bacteria’s generation time is in minutes and hours. Debatable, it takes something like 30 generations to establish a positive change in a genome; thus, a mutation may modify a genome of a person in 600 years. There are many 600 years in four billion years (6.7 million). Thus, biologists view the trail and error process of evolution as a slow moving on-going laborious purposeless process. In contrast to living organism, chemical reactions happen in nanoseconds—billionths of a second. This means chemical reactions, in contrast to slow plodding evolution of living organism, can evolve, literally, at lightening speed.
This begs the question of what constitutes the “fittest” in “survival of the fittest” in terms of a chemical reaction. Hydrogen combines with oxygen to from a stable compound we call water; it is one of the best fittest places for those two compounds. Oxygen combines with carbon because it is also one of the fittest places for those two compounds forming carbon dioxide; therefore, what is fittest is a non-debatable question in many reactions. Struggling to answer this question gave rise to the concept of a milieu of chemical reactions, such as we find in all living organism. Logically, we can define the entire complex of these reactions as being in equilibrium. If a modification in a specific chemical reaction, no matter how small, were not in equilibrium, in the full sense of the word , it would be lost or never would have happened in the first place. Because heat is involved in speed of reactions, and may even determine if a reactions will happen or not, and chemical reactions either produce or consume heat when they happen; therefore, I added the term ‘thermodynamic’ giving concept of “thermodynamic metabolic equilibrium”. If a chemical reaction does not contribute to this equilibrium, that is contribute chemically or thermodynamically, it will not survive that is “it is not fit”. In four billion years of evolution, there are many, many nanoseconds for Darwinian “trial and errors” to determine if any specific chemical change is the fittest.
In terms of Darwin’s concept, any given organism represents a complex set of chemical reactions in thermodynamic metabolic equilibrium that is unique in a specific and definable way. The nature of evolution is such that organism conserve this similarity to a startling degree and only slightly modifies the basic metabolic thermodynamic equilibrium patterns exist. What is startling to biologist is the degree of change in morphology that is possible to induce by a slight and unique change in one or at lest a few reactions. The concept of similarity between living things brings us back to the idea that there is a continuous tract from the hot plasma of the big bang to humankind, from the first formation of organic compounds to single cell organisms, to multi-cellular organism, that is the complexities of all living organisms. Because of our mental ability, I am quick to use man with all of our complex personalities, social structure, and culture as an example of the highest achievement possible in evolution. However, like most biologists, I understand that E. O. Wilson’s ants and their complex social structure are the highest achievement in that line of succession of evolution from the big bang just as an elephant is the highest achievement in their particular line of succession. Although our egos suffer, man is no different; we are no more or no less than the highest in our particular line of succession—for now anyway. Who knows what the products of the next billion years will be?
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