Connecting Ideas in Biology

Preface of Conversations About Biology

Biology deeply intrigues me, both scientifically and sociologically. That it represents one of the most dynamic areas of scientific research today is so patently obvious to even the most casual observer that it teeters dangerously close to a truism, and there is certainly a steady flow of fascinating developments coming from the front lines of biological of research — from genetics to evolutionary biology to our rapidly burgeoning understanding of the mechanics of the human brain.

But that is not all; because unlike modern physics, say, modern biology seems continually forced to grapple with problems largely of its own making, continuously engaged in the business of overturning unsubstantiated judgements and airy declarative statements of a mere few decades ago. I’m not entirely certain why this is the case — I personally suspect that it has to do with a culture of venerating canonical views that begins by demanding its young spend untold hours memorizing thousands of relatively arbitrary names of things, preferably in Latin — but the whole scene has often struck me as something like what I imagine physics before Galileo must have been like.

When I was young, for example, I remember being assured by confident experts that, in striking contrast to other parts of the human body, the brain was a rigidly fixed biological entity whose potential was completely predetermined from birth. And then along came “neuroplasticity” a few decades later, and everything was eventually turned on its head.

Well, revolutions are always exciting, but usually not very efficient. Just imagine how much further ahead we’d be today if we hadn’t unthinkingly instilled false information in previous generations.

As it happens, each one of the five biology conversations that is part of Conversations About Biology has a similar sort of story associated with it: for a long time conventional wisdom dictated something or other that virtually everyone unthinkingly went along with, or nobody had bothered to appreciate the importance of some deeply prevalent phenomenon or shared characteristics in plain sight, and only now are we finally beginning to question our previous worldviews — often with a corresponding scientific impact that is no less than truly spectacular.

In On Atheists and Bonobos Frans de Waal, Emory University, details how primatologists were convinced that chimpanzees have a profoundly different sense of fairness and punishment than humans, a view that his detailed observations have shown to be simply incorrect.

“The literature claimed that the chimpanzees, as opposed to humans, are not capable of dealing with freeloading because they don’t punish whereas humans do punish. But we think that in humans the punishment is exaggerated in the sense that it’s not as important as people think it is, while we find that the chimpanzees are perfectly capable of dealing with all this. We have thousands of cooperative pools and they deal with the freeloaders. Sometimes they punish them but most of the time they sort of avoid them.”

In Learning and Memory Alcino Silva , UCLA, enthuses how his carefully constructed experiments flatly overturned the prevailing dogma that cognitive deficits attributable to a developmental disorder cannot, in principle, be reversed.

“We had these animals with a specific deficit, together with a drug that was targeted at the biochemistry of a certain gene that we believed was responsible for mediating those deficits. And the results were unbelievable. We ran this experiment enough times that we became convinced that for neurofibromatosis type one — NF1­ — we can intervene in the adult and essentially reverse the learning and memory deficits that this animal showed.”

In A Matter of Energy: Biology From First Principles Nick Lane, UCL, describes how for far too long evolutionary biologists have paid insufficient attention to the fact that all cells we know of operate on identical energetic principles of ions and membranes.

“What does this suggest? I don’t think we know, and this is not the kind of question that many people worry themselves about. It could suggest that there’s a fundamental reason underpinning it that it had to be this way and other ways either don’t work as well or simply never got a hold in the first place. It’s different to something like DNA, where as soon as you see the structure, you understand how it works. And with this, it’s just not chemistry. Everybody thought in terms of chemistry, but nobody even dreamed that the intermediate would not be just another chemical molecule, but would be a membrane with an ionic gradient across it. What I’d like to think, and what I think is the case, is that it’s fundamental: that not only does it structure the way that life works here but that it alludes to some general principle that can in some ways explain that whole continuum.”

Matthew Walker, UC Berkeley, relates how the scientific appreciation of sleep has gone from effectively zero to a virtual panacea in a few decades.

“Sleep science has often been considered almost a charlatan science. It’s only been in the past 30 or 40 years that it’s become a valid scientific field of study. 20 years ago, the way the question was posed was, ‘What is the function of sleep? What does sleep do?’ Now, the question has essentially been turned on its head: ‘Is there anything that sleep does not benefit? Is there anything that doesn’t go awry when you don’t get sleep? And is there anything that doesn’t gain an advantage when you do get sleep — seemingly every tissue in the body and every process in the brain?’”

Lastly, Stephen Scherer, University of Toronto, recalls his puzzlement at the long-standing biological conviction that genetic mutations could only occur at single sites on the genome or, in some very particular cases, with additions or deletions of entire chromosomes.

“Trisomy 21 is mainly associated with Down syndrome, but there are other big segments of DNA in a very small portion of the population that are different from each other. 0.4% of the population have these big, big changes, and we’ve known about that for 50 years. On the one hand we’ve got those 3.2 million potential single-nucleotide changes we were discussing earlier that everyone is subjected to, and on the other hand we know that 0.4% of the population experience these large-scale chromosome changes.

“When I was teaching back in 2002, I kept thinking to myself, Biology favours balance. There must be a lot of other variants here. Why is it that we haven’t seen them yet? Well, because we didn’t have the tools to see them.”

Well, not entirely. Of course technology played its role, but as Stephen himself describes, a principal reason why large-scale copy number variation was not discovered during the Human Genome Project was not so much because of the lack of appropriate technology, but rather because of the way the entire project was constructed.

“The Human Genome Project made a consensus sequence of what a human DNA would look like, based on a lot of individuals — I think there were 708 different donors. To come up with a consensus you have to merge them. It’s like a grey picture of what a human genome would look like. And to do that, because there were lots of different pieces of DNA coming together from different individuals, you take the easiest explanation: you essentially force them together and come up with the most common, linear sequence. Just based on the design of how they went about doing things, then, you would not see these large pieces of DNA missing, because you erase that variation when you merge things.”

That today’s biologists are rapidly changing our world to our untold benefit is undeniable. But if we paid a little more attention to the mistakes that have been made and a little less in forcing today’s teenagers to memorize things, we could surely make the future much brighter much sooner.

This is the preface written by Howard Burton of the five-part Ideas Roadshow Collection called Conversations About Biology highlighting the connections between the five individual books that are part of this collection.

Visit our Ideas On Film website for further details: https://ideas-on-film.com/ideas-roadshow-collections/.

For clips of the videos: https://youtu.be/wSNZxybsROs.