Following Richard Dawkins’s publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976, the scientific imagination was captured by the potential of genomics to reveal how genes are copied by Darwinian selection. Dawkins argues that the genes in individuals that contribute to greater reproductive success are the units of selection. His conception of evolution at the molecular level undercuts the complex interactions between organisms and their environments, which are not expressed genomically but are nevertheless key drivers in evolution.
By the 1980s, the acknowledgment among most biologists that even though genes construct bodies, genes and bodies evolve at different rates and with distinct patterns. This realization led to a renewed focus on how bodies change. The Evolutionary Synthesis of the 1930s–1970s had reduced organisms to their genotypes and species to their gene pools, which provided valuable insights about the processes of biological change, but it was only a first approximation. Animals are in fact reactive and adaptable beings, not passive and inert genotypes. Species are clusters of socially interacting and reproductively compatible organisms.
Figure 17.1: A painting by Donald E. Davis representing the Chicxulub asteroid impact off the Yucatan Peninsula that contributed to the mass extinction that included the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago. Credit: Chicxulub impact – artist impression by Donald E. Davis, NASA, is in the public domain.
Once we accept that evolutionary change is fundamentally genetic change, we can ask: How do bodies function and evolve? How do groups of animals come to see one another as potential mates or competitors for mates, as opposed to just other creatures in the environment? Are there evolutionary processes that are not explicable by population genetics? These questions—which lead us beyond reductive assumptions—were raised in the 1980s by Stephen Jay Gould, the leading evolutionary biologist of the late 20th century (see: Gould 2003; 1996).
Gould spearheaded a movement to identify and examine higher-order processes and features of evolution that were not adequately explained by population genetics. For example, extinction, which was such a problem for biologists of the 1600s, could now be seen as playing a more complex role in the history of life than population genetics had been able to model. Gould recognized that there are two kinds of extinctions, each with different consequences: background extinctions and mass extinctions. Background extinctions are those that reflect the balance of nature, because in a competitive Darwinian world, some things go extinct and other things take their place. Ecologically, your species may be adapted to its niche, but if another species comes along that’s better adapted to the same niche, eventually your species will go extinct. It sucks, but it is the way of all life: you come into existence, you endure, and you pass out of existence. But mass extinctions are quite different. They reflect not so much the balance of nature as the wholesale disruption of nature: many species from many different lineages dying off at roughly the same time—presumably as the result of some kind of rare ecological disaster. The situation may not be survival of the fittest as much as survival of the luckiest. The result, then, would be an ecological scramble among the survivors. Having made it through the worst, the survivors could now simply divide up the new ecosystem amongst themselves, since their competitors were gone. Something like this may well have happened about 65 million years ago, when a huge asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula, which mammals survived but dinosaurs did not (Figure 17.1). Something like this may be happening now, due to human expansion and environmental degradation. Note, though, that there is only a limited descriptive role here for population genetics: the phenomena we are describing are about organisms and species in ecosystems.
Another question involved the disconnect between properties of species and the properties of gene pools. For example, there are upwards of 15 species of gibbons but only two species of chimpanzees. Why? There are upwards of 20 species of guenons but fewer than ten of baboons. Why? Are there genes for that? It seems unlikely. Gould suggested that species, as units of nature, might have properties that are not reducible to the genes in their cells. For example, rates of speciation and extinction might be properties of their ecologies and histories rather than their genes. Thus, relationships between environmental contexts and variability within a species result in degrees of resistance to extinction and affect the frequency and rates at which clades diversify (Lloyd and Gould 1993). Consistent biases of speciation rates might well produce patterns of macroevolutionary diversity that are difficult to explain genetically and better understood ecologically. Gould called such biases in speciation rates species selection—a higher-order process that invokes competition between species, in addition to the classic Darwinian competition between individuals.
One of Gould’s most important studies involved the very nature of species. In the classical view, a species is continually adapting to its environment until it changes so much that it is a different species than it was at the beginning of this sentence (Eldredge and Gould 1972). That implies that the species is a fundamentally unstable entity through time, continuously changing to fit in. But suppose, argued Gould along with paleontologist Niles Eldredge, a species is more stable through time and only really adapts during periods of ecological instability and change. Then we might expect to find in the fossil record long equilibrium periods—a few million years or so—in which species don’t seem to change much, punctuated by relatively brief periods in which they change a bit and then stabilize again as new species. They called this idea punctuated equilibria. The idea helps to explain certain features of the fossil record, notably the existence of small anatomical “gaps” between closely related fossil forms (Figure 17.2). Its significance lies in the fact that although it incorporates genetics, punctuated equilibria is not really a theory of genetics but one of types bodies in deep time.
Punctuated equilibria is seen across taxa, with long periods in the fossil record representing little phenotypic change. These periods of stability are disrupted by shorter periods of rapid adaptation, the process through which populations of organisms become suited to living in their environments. Phenotypic changes are often coupled with drastic climatic or ecological changes that affect the milieu in which organisms live. For example, throughout much of hominin evolutionary history, brain size was closely associated with body size and thus remained mostly stable. However, changes occurred in average hominin brain size at around 100 thousand years ago, 1 million years ago, and 1.8 million years ago. Several hypotheses have been put forth to explain these changes, including unpredictability in climate and environment (Potts 1998), social development (Barton 1996), and the evolution of language (Deacon 1998). Evidence from the fossil record, paleoclimate models, and comparative anatomy suggests that the changes observed in hominin lineage result from biocultural processes—that is, the coalescence of environmental and cultural factors that selected for larger brains (Marks 2015; Shultz, Nelson, and Dunbar 2012).
In response to the call for a theory of the evolution of form, the field of evo-devo—the intersection of evolutionary and developmental biology—arose. The central focus here is on how changes in form and shape arise. An embryo matures by the stimulation of certain cells to divide, forming growth fields. The interactions and relationships among these growth fields generate the structures of the body. The hox genes that regulate these growth fields turn out to be highly conserved across the animal kingdom. This is because they repeatedly turn on and off the most basic genes guiding the animal’s development, and thus any changes to them would be catastrophic. Indeed, these genes were first identified by manipulating them in fruit flies, such that one could produce a bizarre mutant fruit fly that grew a pair of legs where its antennae were supposed to be (Kaufman, Seeger, and Olsen 1990).
Certain genetic changes can alter the fates of cells and the body parts, while other genetic changes can simply affect the rates at which neighboring groups of cells grow and divide, thus producing physical bumps or dents in the developing body. The result of altering the relationships among these fields of cellular proliferation in the growing embryo is allometry, or the differential growth of body parts. As an animal gets larger—either over the course of its life or over the course of macroevolution—it often has to change shape in order to live at a different size. Many important physiological functions depend on properties of geometric area: the strength of a bone, for example, is proportional to its cross-sectional area. But area is a two-dimensional quality, while growing takes place in three dimensions—as an increase in mass or volume. As an animal expands, its bones necessarily weaken, because volume expands faster than area does. Consequently a bigger animal has more stress on its bones than a smaller animal does and must evolve bones even thicker than they would be by simply scaling the animal up proportionally. In other words, if you expand a mouse to the size of an elephant, it will nevertheless still have much thinner bones than the elephant does. But those giant mouse bones will unfortunately not be adequate to the task. Thus, a giant mouse would have to change aspects of its form to maintain function at a larger size (see Figure 17.3).
Physiologically, we would like to know how the body “knows” when to turn on and off the genes that regulate growth to produce a normal animal. Evolutionarily, we would like to know how the body “learns” to alter the genetic on/off switch (or the genetic “slow down/speed up” switch) to produce an animal that looks different. Moreover, since organisms differ from one another, we would like to know how the developing body distinguishes a range of normal variation from abnormal variation. And, finally, how does abnormal variation eventually become normal in a descendant species?
Taking up these questions, Gould invoked the work of a British geneticist named Conrad H. Waddington, who thought about genetics in less reductive ways than his colleagues. Rather than isolate specific DNA sites to analyze their function, Waddington instead studied the inheritance of an organism’s reactivity—its ability to adapt to the circumstances of its life. In a famous experiment, he grew fruit fly eggs in an atmosphere containing ether. Most died, but a few survived somehow by developing a weird physical feature: a second thorax with a second pair of wings. Waddington bred these flies and soon developed a stable line of flies who would reliably develop a second thorax when grown in ether. Then he began to lower the concentration of ether, while continuing to selectively breed the flies that developed the strange appearance. Eventually he had a line of flies that would stably develop the “bithorax” phenotype–the suite of traits of an organism–even when there was no ether; it had become the “new normal.” The flies had genetically assimilated the bithorax condition.
Waddington was thus able to mimic the inheritance of acquired characteristics: what had been a trait stimulated by ether a few generations ago was now a normal part of the development of the descendants. Waddington recognized that while he had performed a selection experiment on genetic variants, he had not selected for particular traits. Rather, he helped produce the physiological tendency to develop particular traits when appropriately stimulated. He called that tendency plasticity and its converse, the tendency to stay the same even under weird environmental circumstances, canalization. Waddington had initially selected for plasticity, the tendency to develop the bithorax phenotype under weird conditions, and then, later, for canalization, the developmental normalization of that weird physical trait. Although Waddington had high stature in the community of geneticists, evolutionary biologists of the 1950s and 1960s regarded him with suspicion because he was not working within the standard mindset of reductionism, which saw evolution as the spread of genetic variants that coded for favorable traits. Both Waddington and Gould resisted contemporary intellectual paradigms that favored reductive accounts of evolutionary processes. They conceived of evolution as an emergent process in which many external factors (e.g. climate, environment, predation) and internal factors (e.g., genotypes, plasticity, canalization) coalesce to produce the evolutionary trends that we observe in the fossil record and our genome.
While Gould and Waddington both looked beyond the genome to understand evolution, the Human Genome Project—an international project with the goal of identifying each base pair in the human genome in the 1990s—generated a great deal of public interest in analyzing the human DNA sequence from the standpoint of medical genetics. Some of the rhetoric aimed to sell the public on investing a lot of money and resources in sequencing the human genome in order to show the genetic basis of heritable traits, cure genetic diseases, and learn what it means ultimately to be biologically human. However, the Human Genome Project was not actually able to answer those questions through the use of genetics alone, and thus a broader, more holistic account was required.
This holistic account came from decades of research in human biology and anthropology, which understood the human body as highly adaptable, dynamic, and emergent. For example, in the early 20th century, anthropologist Franz Boas measured the skulls of immigrants to the U.S., revealing that environmental, not merely genetic, factors affected skull shape. The growing human body adjusts itself to the conditions of life, such as diet, sunshine, high altitude, hard labor, population density, how babies are carried—any and all of which can have subtle but consistent effects upon its development. There can thus be no normal human form, only a context-specific range of human forms.
However, what the human biologists called human adaptability, evolutionary biologists called developmental plasticity, and evidence quickly began to mount for its cause being epigenetic modifications to DNA. Epigenetic modifications are changes to how genes are used by the body (as opposed to changes in the DNA sequences; see Chapter 3). Scientific interest shifted from the focus of the Human Genome Project to the ways that bodies are made by evolutionary-developmental processes, including epigenetics. What is meant by “epigenetic modification”? Evolution is about how descendants diverge from their ancestors. Inheritance from parent to offspring is still critical to this process, which occurs through genetic recombination: the pairing of homologous chromosomes and sharing of genetic material during meiosis (see Chapter 3). However, in the 21st century, the link between evolution and inheritance has broadened with a clearer understanding of how environmental and developmental factors shape bodies and the expression of genes, including epigenetic inheritance patterns. While offspring inherit their genes through random assortment during meiosis, environmental factors also shape how genes are used. When these epigenetic modifications occur in germ cells, they can be passed onto offspring. In these cases, there is no change in the DNA sequence but rather in how genes are used by the body due to DNA methylation and the structure of chromosomes due to histone acetylation (see Chapter 3).
In addition, we now recognize that evolution is affected by two other forms of intergenerational transmission and inheritance (in addition to genetics and epigenetics). These forms include behavioral variation and culture. That is, behavioral information can be transmitted horizontally (intragenerationally), permitting more rapid ways for organisms to adjust to the environment. And, then there is the fourth mode of transmission: the cultural or symbolic mode. Humans are the only species that horizontally transmits an arbitrary set of rules to govern communication, social interaction, and thought. This shared information is symbolic and has resulted in what we recognize as “culture”: locally emergent worlds of names, words, pictures, classifications, revered pasts, possible futures, spirits, dead ancestors, unborn descendants, in-laws, politeness, taboo, justice, beauty, and story, all accompanied by practices and a material world of tools.
Consequently our contemporary ideas about evolution see the evolutionary processes as hierarchically organized and not restricted to the differential transmission of DNA sequences into the next generation. While that is indeed a significant part of evolution, the organism and species are nevertheless crucial to understanding how those DNA sequences get transmitted. Further, the transmission of epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic information play a complex role in perpetuating our genes, bodies, and species. In the case of human evolution, one can readily see that symbolic information and cultural adaptation are far more central to our lives and our survival today than DNA and genetic adaptation. It is thus misleading to think of humans passively occupying an environmental niche. Rather, humans are actively engaged in constructing our own niches, as well as adapting to them and using them to adapt. The complex interplay between a species and its active engagement in creating its own ecology is known as niche construction. If we understand natural selection–the process by which populations adapt to their specific environments–as the effects that environmental context has on the reproductive success of organisms, then niche construction is the process through which organisms shape their own selective pressures.
