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Can We Consciously Evolve?
In Lynne MacTaggart’s blog, she highlights a very interesting experiment where bacteria, which was purposefully made unable to consume lactose, changed its own DNA to allow itself to ingest the lactose.
Read an excerpt here:
“Smart bacteria
In fact the latest evidence suggests that information flow between DNA and both inside and outside the body is highly dynamic — as geneticist John Cairns of Harvard’s School of Public Health learned in the mid-1980s. Cairns carried out an experiment that would set off one of the largest arguments in modern biology.
He’d selected bacteria with a genetic defect rendering them unable to digest lactose, the sugar present in milk, then introduced them into a batch of Petri dishes containing cultures whose only food-source was lactose. Without any digestible food, the bacteria faced death by slow starvation.
According to orthodox science, the bacteria would not be able to colonize; without a food source to drive metabolic processes, they could not carry out normal reproduction. Nevertheless, in every Petri dish, Cairns found a goodly number of thriving colonies.
When Cairns tested for genetic changes in his colonies, he found that a single type of gene had changed – those preventing for lactose metabolism. Identical changes in just those genes had occurred within every new colony in every Petri dish.
Through some unknown mechanism, the bacteria had activated life-saving mutations in direct response to an extreme environmental crisis, and these mutations had saved their lives.
Somehow the extreme environmental conditions had caused changes in genes, enabling the bacteria to digest the only food available to them.
The bacteria had evolved purposefully, not randomly, in order to restore balance and harmony with their environment.
Directed mutation
In 1988, Cairns published his findings in the prestigious journal Nature under the droll title ‘The Origin of Mutants,’ an irreverent nod to Charles Darwin.
Darwin had proposed that the evolution of species occurs randomly through copying errors in inherited characteristics, but that only those changes most conducive to survival prevailed.
Cairns instead proposed that cells within organisms have the ability to orchestrate their own ‘directed mutation,’ rapidly adapting to a changing environment.
American journal Science dismissed Cairns’ work as tantamount to heresy, and it took ten years for the first popular science publication to introduce his material to the public.
As other researchers looked closer, they discovered that Cairns was right. Under environmental stress, a special enzyme in a bacterium cell gets activated, initiating a fevered copying process of cell DNA with a deliberate array of random mistakes like a photocopier run amuck — a mechanism now referred to as ‘somatic hypermutation.’
If any one of these mutated genes happens to be able to assemble a protein with the key to overcoming the environmental problem, the unthinkable occurs: the bacterium excises and jettisons the original problem gene from its DNA, and then replaces it with the new gene.
This is the likely process by which bacteria manage to outwit antibiotics.
Restructuring your genes
Other scientists after Cairns have begun to show that the environment is constantly changing an organism, not simply through epigenetics – the study of factors above the gene that turn it on or off — but directly by changing genes.
They’ve discovered a host of biochemical systems that restructure DNA. The information flow to and from DNA is interactive, occurring in two directions from other parts of the body and even from the outside.
James Shapiro, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago, studies the means by which organisms can actively restructure their own genetic information.
Genes change, says Shapiro, as a consequent of ‘natural genetic engineering,’ not from accidents — but a constant dynamic process of adaptation between an organism and its environment.
‘Today we know that biological molecules change their structures as they interact with other molecules,’ he says, ‘and these structural changes contain information about the external environment and conditions within the cells.’
Shapiro likes to refer to the genome as a ‘read-write memory system,’ rather than blueprint, that gets modified by a host of influences – internal and external.
Symbiotic partnership
All of this suggests something enormous. Modern evolutionary synthesis emphasizes that your future is a genetic crap shoot — a case of good or bad genes.
Presently we are discovering that the natural world is created as a dynamic, symbiotic partnership, and evolutionary change, in a sense, is prompted by a joint solution, restoring balance and harmony when an organism is out of alignment with its environment.
So the big question is not simply how we humans are going to amend the havoc we’ve wreaked upon the earth.”
So my fundamental question is did the bacteria evolve consciously? Did it know it couldn’t ingest the lactose and make an intentional change in its own DNA?
Or is this an example of the perfection in nature in maintaining life no matter what the circumstances?
Can we as humans also gain the ability to physically evolve at will?
That is an amazing concept!
Write On!
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