Stages of Transmutation by Idema Tom

Author:Idema, Tom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Reviving Lamarck’s discredited theory of the heritability of newly acquired traits, Koestler’s work is a very early challenge to the Modern Synthesis comprised in the 1950s after Watson and Crick’s publication on the structure of DNA. In Bear’s Darwin novels, the Koestlerian notion of intelligent evolution is manifested at the level of internal selection by a “genomic computer” but also at the level of a species-wide “neural network.” If Bear’s work is vitalistic, this is not the “old spooky vitalism” (104), as Kay calls it in Darwin’s Radio, which summons an intelligent force behind evolution but a vision in which life is the capacity to differ, the differential element of a set of systemic forces. Evolution, for Bear, is a creative process involving communications between organisms and ecosystems rather than an abstract process of natural selection acting on successful selfish behavior.

To further unpack the imagination of nomad biology in Bear’s novels, I will focus now on its explicit engagement with the work of Lynn Margulis. It is suggested by Kay that SHEVA may be a product of long-term symbiotic relationships. In the brief reading list offered as an appendix to Darwin’s Children, Bear acknowledges his indebtedness to Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan, whom he calls “the most stimulating popular writing team in modern biology” (490). Margulis is even attributed a minor role as a character in Darwin’s Radio. After having appeared on national TV to announce her discovery, Kay is called on the phone by “Lynn,” who congratulates her on her success (90). Kay compares her experiences specifically to the “criticism and injustice” experienced by both Darwin and Margulis during their careers. Rewriting the story of life is a politically risky exercise.

In a series of articles and books written from the late 1960s onwards, Margulis demonstrated that mitochondrial DNA, which comprises approximately two-thirds of all human DNA, is of viral origin: we are populated by strange visitors and have been all along. According to Margulis, speciation in general is the result of long-term symbiotic relations between different organisms that combine their genetic material to create wholly new species, a process she calls endosymbiogenesis. In their popular scientific book Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of The Origins of Species (2002), Margulis and Sagan argue that there has been a fundamental misunderstanding of the work of Darwin in the dominant paradigm of neo-Darwinism. They debunk the idea that male-female sexual intercourse has been central in the evolution of life on earth. Hybridity, or the recombination of genetic material through mating, is an important element in the development of mammals but not in plants or bacteria. Margulis and Sagan challenge the neo-Darwinian conception of evolution as the gradual accumulation of random mutations as “not so much ‘wrong’ as oversimplified and incomplete: it misses the symbiotic forest for the genetic trees” (201). Although they recognize the role of random mutation, they state that these changes are “nearly always inconsequential or detrimental” and that their role has, in the past half-century, been “dogmatically overemphasized” (15). Evolutionary change can only be explained by looking at creative, collective behavior.

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