Bacterial evolution can be accelerated with the MAGE technique to produce large numbers of  favorable mutations (micrograph image of E. coli bacteria magnified 10, 000 times)

Bacteria are prolific replicators, and some species can replicate into the millions in just a few hours. Bacteria, in the functioning of their cellular and biochemical machinery, also just happen to manufacture some very useful chemicals and bio-active molecules. The microbe populations also exhibit high rates of random mutation, which can confer adaptive traits, over time, onto the newer, variant population.

These attributes of bacterial life forms have been exploited in the biology lab (and in other industries) for some time, but generating genomic diversity in the lab has been challenging; inserting genes or entire genetic sequences into a cell’s nucleus (and DNA) can be done readily, but controlling or directing how exactly these hybrids mutate, is quite another thing. Further, new phenotypes (the main physical traits or properties) don’t usually happen fast or frequently enough for practical uses. But with a new technique called MAGE (Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering), bacteria are now being engineered (and “directed”) to perform these functions much faster and much more efficiently.

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Charles Darwin, 1879

In this the 150th anniversary year of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (and the 200th anniversary year of his birth), it is worth returning to that era of profound discovery and re-examining some of the controversies and earlier evolutionary theories begotten in the years just preceding its publication.

Today (and ever since Origin), the core, controversial idea of evolution tends to be rather simplistically summed up as: “We are descended from apes”. Of course, Darwinism, as it came to be called, was far more than this simplistic distillation. Even still, Darwin’s description of evolution as “descent with modification”, as well as his positing of vast geologic time scales, the agencies of natural and sexual selection, and a common ancestry to all living creatures, were not the fundamental, conceptual causes of the controversies.

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Scanning electron micrograph of Escherichia coli

Using two different model organisms–the E. coli bacterium and the single-celled yeast–scientist have begun unraveling a puzzling behavior of many micro-organisms: the ability to “predict” a change in environmental conditions.

It has been assumed for most of the history of micro-biological science that such micro-organisms are purely “reflexive”; they simply respond and adapt to external stimuli (such as exposure to chemicals, heat stress, or drugs). But research over he past 2 years by two different scientific teams (a Princeton team lead by Saeed Tavazoie, and, a team from the Weizmann Institute in Israel) is shaking up present understanding and over-turning basic assumptions.

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Newsweek explains how hunting cause “evolution reverse”:

Researchers describe what’s happening as none other than the selection process that Darwin made famous: the fittest of a species survive to reproduce and pass along their traits to succeeding generations, while the traits of the unfit gradually disappear. Selective hunting—picking out individuals with the best horns or antlers, or the largest piece of hide—works in reverse: the evolutionary loser is not the small and defenseless, but the biggest and best-equipped to win mates or fend off attackers.

Image:  swanksalot on Flickr under a Creative Commons License

Perhaps the most important and influential work of natural history—for almost a hundred years before Darwin’s Origin—was the Systema Naturae, authored by the great Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. The hugely popular and best selling book was essentially a book of nomenclature and taxonomy, with the former being as important, if not more so, than the latter. The modern convention of binomial nomenclature–genus and species—for naming all living things, was formally systematized by Linnaeus, and remains unchanged to this day.

Linnaeus himself was greatly influenced by his predecessor, the parson-naturalist John Ray (“The first step of science is to know one thing from another”). It is difficult to over-estimate the importance of this work. The Systema strove to lay out God’s creation in a rational and orderly way, and in this, to the extent that species were known (and there would be several updates), he succeeded. To be sure, his taxonomy only superficially described relationships (amongst members of a genus, like Canus, for example), but these relationships were non-derivative of ancestral forms; they were fixed and eternal. The famous phrase Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit, or, “God created, Linnaeus organized”, is attributed to Linnaeus himself (who saw himself as a second Adam), and was his capitulation to the over-riding belief in the fixity of animal and plant forms–that God’s creation was discreet (non-continuous in Nature) and absolute, needing only a bit of organizational “tidying up”. The book was viewed as a nearly perfect reflection of The Great Chain of Being. To challenge it was to challenge God’s creation, so much were the two viewed as inseparable and indistinguishable.

And so it was that this conceptualization–the Scala Naturae–coupled with the authoritative Systema Naturae–that supported perhaps the greatest intellectual edifice yet devised by man. Only Newton’s Principia Mathematica could be held up as an equal intellectual achievement.

The modern theological notion of Intelligent Design also can be traced to this seminal conceptualization of Nature. Those who beheld Linnaeus’ elegant tome could hardly escape the conclusion that such an orderly advancement and collection of marvelous and diverse forms could only be the result of Design (perhaps a latter day, unknowing inversion of the alchemical maxim ‘As above, so below’). Again, I must note its explicit and implicit meaning: that God’s creation is complete—a “once and future” Nature—and that was that. The role of science in this grand scheme (epitomized in the achievements of Linnaeus) was but to name and praise God’s creation. New species may be discovered (for God manifests his creative urges everywhere, even in places hidden from learned men), but they did not evolve into new creatures, i.e., engage in the “transmutation of organic substance” (Darwin). Neither could they go extinct.

Every botanist, zoologist, and naturalist, from the late Eighteenth Century through the Nineteenth Century would be hugely impacted by the Systema Naturae (and certainly these could only dream of achieving its commercial success). But there is a great irony in Linnaeus’ achievement. Linnaeus would, in his later years, express to close friends his sincere doubts as to the “natural” basis of his system. Perhaps, in its elegant mapping out of creation, it brought into sharper relief both its own artifice and the implicit relatedness of things—that “transmutation of organic substance” that later naturalists like Lamark, Wallace and Darwin would observe and describe so astutely.

Many 19th century, religious naturalists, confronted with the growing fossil evidence of creatures no longer living (in Europe and in the “young” America of the New World), would insist that such “extinctions” were local only; that all species that ever lived surely continued to live elsewhere—if at a great remove from civilized European society. And the more obvious facts of animal husbandry and breeding practices, forced believers in Special Creation to admit a certain “plasticity” in specific forms, but only to a limited degree; a species was primary; its general form was rigid.

Some theologically inclined naturalists (and many such-minded folk existed then) would come to assert a geologic theory known as catastrophism to resolve the observed discrepancies in Nature (the disappearance of flora and fauna) with this venerable conception of Nature. Catastrophism—the idea that massive, global events like earthquakes and floods accounted for all the “discontinuities” in Nature–was perhaps an early 19th Century way of saying: “S**t happens!” It permitted mass extinctions as cycles of creation within Creation. It was thus also a form of supernaturalism; these catastrophic forces acted upon nature (via God’s intervening will) just a much as any “natural” (”self-governing”) geologic force could be said to, without any greater proof to the contrary—and they can all take place within the Biblically confirmed few millennia. In the “culture wars” of that time, the catastrophists were frequently on the same side as the progressionists, for both placed severe limits on the age of the Earth, with the former accepting divine intervention in geologic history, and with the latter asserting the working through of Divine Design in Nature.

The geologist Charles Lyell—who in his early career denied evolutionary theories—believed in a continuous succession of forms, taking place over great ages, and which operated according to natural law. The theory came to be known as uniformitarianism and it permitted no room for any outside intervention. Perhaps as a reaction to the catastrophists’ beliefs, early proponents of this view (such as James Hutton) denied the existence of epochs of destruction/extinction and cycles of faunal recreation. It is only today, as modern paleontology has revealed the Permian and KT extinctions (amongst many others) that we can see the irony here of Darwin’s greatest intellectual influence—Charles Lyell—denying the existence of great extinctions in order to advance his theory of natural, successive  change.

“A venerable Oragutang” - caricature of Darwin from The Hornet, a satirical magazine of 19th Century England

But it was these two provocative ideas–that species cold become extinct, and, that new species could arise–that first began to chip away at the mighty edifice that was The Great Chain of Being. Darwin’s later, key concept of “descent with modification” was but a final, intellectual nail in the coffin of Special Creation. From this observation—coupled with the Lyell’s theories of vast geological time scales and continuity of action–one could readily infer descent from earlier, but morphologically related, forms. To be sure, this was truly a revolutionary synthesis. But it was these former two notions— hinted at in the pre-Origin writings of Wallace, Darwin and others–that caused the first disruptive waves of the advancing scientific flood. For they implied the unthinkable: a creation neither perfect (creatures could die out) nor complete (new creatures could emerge). This was a dual assertion that anyone, of nearly any social stature, could comprehend.

As these ideas came out into the public arena, the shock waves would follow. The much later, popularized notion of humans being descendants of apes (or often, ignorantly, “of monkeys”) would come to replace (in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century) these earlier, outrageous insinuations by England’s respected and cherished core of naturalists. But these possibilities of extinction and emergence remained implicit in every mention of descent, natural selection, and the “possibility of continued divergence” (Wallace).

In a relevant side note to history: the famous pea plant experiments of the German monk Gregor Mendel—first presented as a paper to a small, non-comprehending audience in Brűnn, Germany in 1865—were virtually unknown to Darwin and his contemporaries. Mendel’s work on the inheritance of traits in plants actually held the key to the unknown agency of species change that so bedeviled Darwin. Darwin’s theory of natural selection (and later, sexual selection), powerful as it was, could not explain how any original variation in appearance could arise and spread throughout a population (Note: DNA was discovered in the 1860’s by Swiss biologist Miesher, but its function/purpose remained unknown until the 20th Century)

In fact, it was on this point that the now famous Darwin would receive his fist major challenge to his theory of natural selection. The challenge would come from a Scottish engineer named Fleeming Jenkin. Jenkin, whose work would come to serve as the cornerstone for the 20th Century science of population genetics, presented a convincing mathematical challenge to Darwin: any new,  “fortuitous” variation would be quickly “swamped” (outnumbered) by more pervasive traits, and would be quickly eliminated from the population, due to numerical inferiority. Thus natural selection—what Darwin had posited as the agency responsible for spreading fortuitous traits throughout a species—was insufficient and inadequate in explaining how any variation could take hold and persevere (the specific example here being the male peacock’s colorful plumage).

Darwin, recognizing the mathematical power of this argument, would come to express some self-doubt as to his over-reliance on this agency, and, in later editions of The Origin of Species, he would include consideration of Jenkin’s argument. This problem of how to explain spontaneous variation within species, and its spread throughout a population, was so vexing to Darwin that he would, in his later years, fall back on a somewhat more subtle Lamarkian explanation for the cause of this variation (Darwin posited the subordinate and malleable character of the “germ plasm” in receiving “messengers” from somatic cells with acquired traits).

And regarding this aforementioned, pseudo-scientific theory: history has been unkind to Lamarck, for although he is credited with the scientifically discredited notion of acquired inheritance (to explain the emergence of new traits), he was in fact a remarkable thinker and scholar of natural history, and in most cases, was in agreement with Darwin’s theories, and in respect to evolutionary theories, was as “cutting edge” as Darwin or Wallace. Both Darwin and Lamarck were transitional figures in this intellectual journey, and neither could entirely free himself of the vestiges of past concepts; Lamarck simply could not unshackle himself from The Great Chain of Being, and Darwin, could not fully abandon the aesthetic appeal of progressionism (“All corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.”), despite his more forceful, earlier denunciation of it.

This crucial, missing piece of knowledge—the source and/or means of variation and stability in species (the non-blending of dominant and recessive traits)–impacted the thinking of other great minds as well. Even Darwin’s co-evolutionist contemporary and friend, the esteemed naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (who had arrived at a similar theory of natural selection), despite his powerful insights into the true age of the human species, would come to assert “some higher intelligence must have directed the process by which the human race was developed.” This contention did not sit well with Darwin, who felt that Wallace was abandoning their special, theoretical “baby” (which, as mentioned above, Darwin would also come close to doing later on).

So, it was not simply the pre- or anti-evolutionists who lent credence to these pseudo-scientific ideas (i.e., the inheritance of acquired characteristics and Intelligent Design); strangely, it was sometimes the evolutionists themselves. Evolution in the 19th Century was still a young concept, still taking its
alternately bold and tentative steps as a modern, scientific theory (and would remain highly contentious well after Darwin’s follow up book, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, in 1871).

Returning now to Mendel: had his experiments been understood and disseminated when he first presented them (as much as Darwin’s writings were, for Mendel had read them), they surely world have solidly buttressed evolutionary theory, and promoted the “modern synthesis” (Darwinian selection and Mendelian inheritance) much sooner, saving Darwin great anxiety, and Wallace from having to assert intelligent direction in human evolution. Mendel’s equally revolutionary paper (‘Experiments in Plant Hybridization’) would not be rediscovered until 1900, fittingly, by students of Darwin.

It is strong testament to the power of a cherished and long-established concept (as was the Scala Naturae) that naturalists, botanists and other learned men of Mendel’s day could not comprehend his unprecedented ideas on inheritance, and so, his work was assigned to the dusty library shelves of all works ahead of their time.

Returning now to my main theme: one can scarcely imagine today the world-shattering nature of these assertions, and especially, in Darwin’s case, coming from one who had intended to join the seminary after his return from the Galapagos! How many men of the cloth, having taken up the disciplined study of God’s creation, have provided the science by which to reject the need for God? Modern historical accounts tend to skip over, or give scant mention to, these first intellectual salvos against the majestic edifice of a Biblically based conception of the Natural Order.

It is akin perhaps to Giordano Bruno’s 15th Century declaration that the Earth was not the center of God’s cosmos, except that these 19th Century naturalists were not burned alive—only threatened with eternal hell-fire for their presumptuous arrogance. But these early pioneers of natural science and biology no doubt felt intensely the criticisms and excoriations of the more pious and powerful, as they, led by Darwin, dared to step outside their divinely assigned roles as mere describers of Nature, and into their Promethean roles as bringers of intellectual fire to civilization.

– Michael Ricciardi

Image credits: Library of Congress - Public Domain

The Bravo TV Series, Top Chef, is one of the highest rated food shows on television right now, and it all started with Season 1 where Harold Dieterle won over the judges and emerged as one of the hottest new chefs in the country world.  But despite the fame and celebrity status that has ensconced him since his big win, Harold remains the picure of humility, reaffirming his commitment to hard work, passion for cooking and his one true love, food.

Although I spent most of season 1 swooning over him his dishes, I put on my journalist’s cap and was the picture pf professionalism in conducting an interview with him (thanks to Divya Gugnani, founder of Behind the Burner) where I learned that it takes more than just skills to create a culinary masterpiece.  It takes heart.  And that’s something Harold has by the measuring cup full.

Favorite indulgent food: Sun Chips & Ben Jerry’s Ice Cream

Favorite healthy food: Ripe Fresh Fruit

One kitchen tool you can’t live without: Vita Prep Blender

One ingredient you can’t live without: Salt

Your cooking philosophy in one sentence: Love it and it will do whatever you want
 
I couldn’t start out the interview without talking about Top Chef. What was it like to win such a fiercely competitive and high profile competition?

It was a great honor to be recognized by influential people in the food industry.  

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