Darwin's Island (3 page)

The logic of evolution is simple. There exists, within all plants and animals, variation passed from one generation to the next. More individuals are born than can live or breed. As a result, there develops a struggle to stay alive and to find a mate. In that battle, those who bear certain variants prevail over others less well endowed. Such inherited differences in the ability to transmit genes - natural selection, as Darwin called it - mean that the advantageous forms become more common as the generations succeed each other. In time, as new versions accumulate, a lineage may change so much that it can no longer exchange genes with those that were once its kin. A new species is born.

Natural selection is a factory that makes almost impossible things. It manufactures what seems like design with no need for a designer. Evolution builds complicated organs like the eye, the ear or the elbow by piecing together favoured variants as they arise. Almost as an afterthought, it generates new forms of life.

Its tale as told in
The Origin of Species
turns on the efforts of farmers as they develop new breeds from old, on changes in wild creatures exposed to the rigours of nature and the demands of the opposite sex, on the tendency of isolated places to evolve unique forms, and on the silent words of the fossils that tell of a planet as it was before evolution moved on. Its pages speak of the embryo as a key to the past and of how structures no longer of value and others that appear almost too perfect are each testimony of the power of natural selection. The geography of life, on islands, continents and mountains, is also evidence of the common descent of mushrooms, mice and men. Most of all, life’s diversity can be arranged into a series of groups arranged within groups, of ever-decreasing affinity, as a strong hint that they split apart from each other longer and longer ago.

The Descent of Man
uses that logic to disentangle the history of a single species. Unique as it might think itself,
Homo sapiens
is animal like all others. The book’s famous last sentence reads, in full: ‘I have given the evidence to the best of my ability: and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system - with all these exalted powers - Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’

 

In 1871 - and even in 1971 - the evidence for that final and provocative statement was weak indeed. Now, everything has changed. The entire evolutionary case can be made in terms of ourselves and our relatives; of apes and monkeys, of chimps and gorillas, and of men and women. Our new ability to look at genes, cells, tissues and organs in exquisite detail means that we know more about the human past than about that of any other species. Evolution is best viewed through our own eyes; and not just because we are all interested in where we came from but because advances in science mean that
Homo sapiens
has become the embodiment of every evolutionary idea. Darwin’s theory has not altered much in the century and a half since it was proposed. The technology used to study it has, on the other hand, been transformed.

Technical as they have become, the tools used today to examine the past would have been familiar in their nature, if not in their details, to biologists of the nineteenth century. Charles Darwin was, among his many talents, a proficient anatomist. He used changes in the physical structure of pigeons, pigs and people as evidence for his theory. The first chapter of
The Descent of Man
is a somewhat ponderous account of the differences between the bones and bodies of men and apes. Dissection, once at the centre of biology (and biologists of a certain age still flinch at the smell of formalin), not long ago appeared antiquated, but now it looks very modern. Molecular biology is no more than comparative anatomy plus a mountain of cash. Its chemical scalpels cut up creatures into thousands of millions of individual letters of DNA code. Those who wield them have shown beyond all doubt the truth behind Queen Victoria’s fear that the bodily frame of Jenny the orang-utan was proof of the common ancestry of humans with apes and with far more.

The Human Genome Project - the scheme to read off our own DNA sequence - set the seal on an enterprise which began in the sixteenth century when Vesalius opened the heart and discovered that it had four chambers rather than the three insisted on by the Greeks. Its completion was announced in 2000 and again in 2003, 2006 and 2008 (and some parts of the double helix still remain unread). A science that had been in its infancy a mere description of bones and muscles became an adolescent when
The Origin of Species
showed how shared structure was evidence of common descent. It has at last matured. The anatomy of DNA has become the key to the history of life.

In a glass-fronted cabinet at University College London resides the stuffed body of the eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ man. His Auto-Icon, as he called it, was an attempt at a memorial that would cost less than the showy shrines then fashionable. Bentham was convinced that his idea would catch on. Two centuries later, it did. James Watson - the surviving half of the duo who unwound the double helix - was presented with his own auto-icon, a compact disc of his entire DNA sequence, which he can, if he wishes, display for public edification in a small plastic case.

Watson’s essence is coded into a tangled mass of intricate chemistry. The egg that made him contained two metres of DNA and each of the billions of cells that descend from it as his body grows and ages has a copy. Each of those molecular sentences is written in three thousand two hundred million letters, the four bases of the familiar genetic code. Twenty years ago, when the scheme to read the whole lot off was proposed, it took months to decipher the number of letters found in this paragraph. The molecule was sliced into random bits, each was read from end to end and the whole genome stitched together with a search for places where the fragments overlap. Such methods are antique. Today’s machines pick up flashes of light from molecules tagged with fluorescent dyes, each base with its own colour, and squeezed one at a time through tiny pores. It takes no more than a few hours to read off a piece as long as this entire book, which itself contains less than one part in several thousand of the whole content of the human genome. Soon it will become possible to sequence single molecules rather than multiple copies, as is now necessary, and enthusiasts speak of machines that will read off a million DNA bases a second.

The first human sequence cost up to a billion dollars and Watson’s version was auctioned off for a million. In 2008 the Knome Corporation offered to read off the DNA of anybody with a spare $350,000. In fact, the whole lot can now be done for a fraction of that sum. Within five years the price will drop to a few thousand dollars per genome and it will become possible to decipher the DNA of any creature at nominal cost. The web of kinship that binds life together will then be revealed in all its details.

The raw material of evolution is, in its physical structure as an intertwined helix, simple or even elegant, but in its biology is entirely the opposite. In its details DNA is, frankly, a mess, for natural selection has been forced to build upon what it already has. Life did not emerge from engineering, but from expedience. The Darwinian machine has no strategy and can never look forward. Its tactics are based on the moment, and the genomes it makes, like the creatures they code for, are the products of a set of short-term fixes. James Watson’s molecule is marked by redundancy, decay and the scars of battles long gone. Genes - like cells, guts and brains - work, but only just.

Human DNA contains long stretches that appear to be useless and numerous sections that are mirror-images of each other. Repetition is everywhere: of particular genes into families that carry out similar tasks and of multiplied lengths of material that seems redundant. The remnants of viruses make up almost half the total and the remainder is littered by the decayed hulks of ancient and once functional structures. All but one part in fifty of the genome was, as a result, once (mistakenly) dismissed as biological garbage.

The genes themselves have become blurred and ambiguous as we learn more. There are far fewer than expected when the genome project was proposed - just over twenty thousand rather than the multitude then assumed to be essential. Some overlap with each other or say different things when read in opposite directions or when active in different tissues. Many contain inserted sequences of DNA that looks as if they have no function (although some of the supposed junk does a useful job while other sections cause disease should they wake up and shift position). Plenty of questions remain. How important is the part - often a small part - of each gene that codes for proteins compared with the on and off switches, the accelerators and brakes, and the rest of the control machinery? We do not know.

Even the size of the package makes little sense. A chicken has slightly less DNA than does a Nobel laureate but half its genes are identical, or almost so, to our own - evidence, given that we last shared an ancestor three hundred million years ago, of how conservative evolution can be. A tiny plant called
Arabidopsis
, a relative of the Brussels sprout, has more genes than either. All this says more about how hard it can be to define what a gene actually is than about the talents of sprout versus sentient being.

Eight decades passed between Vesalius’ dissection of the heart and the discovery of the circulation of the blood. The genome is now in that transitional period. DNA’s nuts and bolts (and even some of its bells and whistles) have been dismantled, but most of those who work on it still study structure without much insight into function. William Harvey (the circulation man) saw the heart as a mere pump, and understood nothing of its exquisite system of control. Genes are much the same. Each is linked into a network with others and responds to messages from both within and outside the cell. The path from instruction to product is a labyrinth, rather than a straight line. The proteins that pour from the cell’s biological factories are not simple blocks that slot together but are folded, spliced, cut, or fused into new mixtures in a way that depends on local conditions almost as much as upon their own structure. Diseases as different as diabetes and prostate cancer may arise from damage in the same segment of DNA, while others such as breast cancer emerge from errors in several different genes. Most of the double helix is switched off the majority of the time, African genes are, on average, more active than are those of Europeans and life has begun to look far more complicated than any molecular biologist had feared.

Evolutionists are not in the least surprised. They were baffled at some of the decisions made by those who ran the Genome Project. Like Vesalius, James Watson and his colleagues had a Platonic view of existence. Every heart and every human was built on the same plan and to understand one was to understand them all. The first DNA sequencers outPlato-ed Plato for they assumed not just that the essence of humankind could be found within a single person, but that this Mr Average was, in the interests of political correctness, best stitched together from bits of double helix taken from random donors across the globe.

That was a big mistake. The Platonic approach ignores the vital truth that evolution is a comparative science. Natural selection depends on inherited differences. To understand the past biology needs not just a single genome but many. To map variation from person to person, from place to place, or from species to species shows how, when and where evolution has been at work. So central is diversity to the idea of descent with modification that the first two chapters of
The Origin
are devoted to the nature and extent of variability in the bodies and habits of plants and animals. Now, genetics has begun to tell the tale in the language of DNA.

James Watson’s auto-icon disclosed no more than half his secrets for it contained just one of the two versions of the double helix present in each cell. His rival in the race to decipher the secrets of life, the biologist and businessman Craig Venter, was less reticent. He read off both his copies, that received from his father and that from his mother. Venter was happy to reveal its contents: his father died young of a heart attack, and he has himself been bequeathed a variant that predisposes to the disease. He has also inherited genes supposed to increase the wish to seek novelty, to be active in the evening rather than early in the day and to have wet rather than dry ear wax.

Whatever Venter’s intimate chemistry says about his personality, his bed-time or the exudations of his auditory canal, it has a message for us all for it gave the first hint of the true level of human diversity. Both his parents are white Europeans (and hence represent just a small sample of mankind) but their DNA is distinct at around one site in two hundred along the entire chain - which adds up to tens of millions of differences between them.

On the global scale, hundreds of millions of sites in the inherited alphabet vary from person to person and the ‘Thousand Genomes Project’, now well under way, has set out to fund out just how many there might be. Unlike its predecessors it will search out rare variants, those carried by fewer than one person in a hundred and present in vast abundance - and given the advances of technology, the project may cost little more than fifty million dollars. Already we know that each of the twenty-three human chromosomes - the physical location of the genes - has millions of single-letter changes aligned along it. The variable sites are so tightly packed together that, over short lengths of the double helix, they almost never separate when the molecule is cut, spliced and reordered, as it always is when sperm or egg is formed. Such long blocks represent sets of chemical letters that travel down the generations together. Rather like surnames, they are excellent clues of relatedness.