The Evolution Paradigm Shift

[tama]

20. From the interview:

Suzan Mazur: So it’s going to be a while before there’s a real coherence to evolutionary science.

James Shapiro: Well I suppose. People are always going to try to unify, and other people are going to be diversifying. The unifications are always going to involve trying to impose artificial constraints on natural phenomena, and I think they’re doomed to failure.

We have this terrible dilemma in science. We need to be reductionists to get meaningful results and make observations. But when we take the observations and try to understand what they mean, then we have to stop being reductionists and become integrationists to understand how the things we’ve identified and singled out fit into the whole picture.

We’ve lost sight of that need for integration with the successes of molecular biology. But I think we’re getting back to an integrationist view now because people are studying complex problems like cell biology and multicellular development using molecular tools. It’s becoming clear that there’s an interaction between the parts and the whole which is far more complex and multidirectional than people used to think.

I think that that shift from reductionism to integrationism actually needs to happen in the physical sciences as well. They still hang on very much to the idea that you can have “a theory of everything.” I’m rather dubious about that.

Again, my experience in science has taught me that you should never say that something can’t happen because we’re continually discovering things we’ve been told can’t happen. It’s just been a few years since we’ve realized cells can pick up fragments of sequence from invading DNA. Whether they do it at the DNA level or the RNA level is not entirely clear yet. But they can pick up fragments of a sequence from invaders, incorporate them into their genomes and then defend themselves. We were told that was impossible based on the Luria-Delbrueck experiment.

Being more inclusive and more open to new ideas and imaginative approaches will serve us best. It should be difficult for new ideas to become accepted because that’s how you really test their worth, their value. But it does not make any sense from a truly scientific point of view to exclude things a priori.