and there were theories of evolution before his time. Among these was a one advanced by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the early nineteenth century. He proposed that individuals can gain or lose capacities based on their advantageous use or lack of use. Therefore, individuals can inherit features from their ancestors based on their pattern of use. Examples that are often presented include giraffes stretching their necks to reach leaves thus imparting slightly longer necks to their offspring. In this way, it was contended that changes in the environment can yield gradual changes in individual organisms based on that pattern of their respective use or disuse of capacities.

Another theory, Uniformitarianism, was propounded by Charles Lyell between 1830 and 1833. He asserted that the laws of nature are constant and immutable over time and space and that such laws could be identified and would account for evolution.

New theories abounded after Darwin, too. In 1893 William Haacke and the zoologist Theodor Eimer espoused Orthogenesis. They generally conceived of evolution as moving forward in a straight line and held to a regular course by non-random forces that are internal to the structure of organisms. These internal factors essentially propel an organism forward developmentally and selection is limited in scope.

The Vitalists in the early 20th Century proposed that evolution was driven by the fact that living organisms are fundamentally different from inanimate ones as they are imbued with an intrinsic ‘vital spark’ or energy. This was not a new idea and, in fact, it was an ancient doctrine that had been believed by many great scientists including Louis Pasteur. However, this concept was eclipsed by the rediscovery in 1900, by Hugo De Vries and Carl Correns, of the critical work previously done by Gregor Mendel, an Austrian friar and scientist who is considered the father of classical genetics. He had discovered by working with garden peas that the result of a cross between peas of different colors was not only a blend, but also yielded offspring of both separate colors in predictable ratios. He conceived of the concept of heredity units, which he called “factors” and were later called genes.

The rediscovery of Mendel’s work in genetics led to a variety of new proposals and theories and a division in perspective that this reverberates today. One school of theory favored viewing evolutionary development as primarily proceeding by large mutations or jumps, called Saltationism. Another opposing school, the Biometric school, advocated that variation was continuous and gradual in most organisms and favored a mathematical and statistical approach. Both were attempting to unite Darwinism with genetics and it is this latter approach that is embodied in what is termed the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis or current Neo-Darwinism.

The development of population genetics as the study of genetic variation and gene distribution in populations under the influence of natural selection was pioneered by Fisher, Haldane, and Wright. Their work was fundamental in establishing many of the underlying principles of Neo-Darwinism. The Williams Revolution of the mid 1960s shifted thinking from population genetics models to natural selection via kin selection. In this model, the gene is the fundamental unit of self-preservation either by acting to protect and preserve itself or closely related genes. This was expanded by Richard Dawkins who popularized the concept of the “selfish gene,” a gene centered view of evolution with selection acting on the genes themselves and not only on organisms or populations. In this view, we are just genetic vessels or carriers.
Contemporaneous to Dawkins, the concept of endosymbiosis was widely popularized by Lynn Margulis in the 1970s although it had been proposed decades earlier. The underlying theme of ‘endosymbiotic theory’ as formulated as early as the late 1960s was that the evolution of eukaryotic cells (cells with complex structures enclosed by membranes) over millions of years was enacted by the interdependence and cooperative existence of multiple prokaryotic organisms engulfing and incorporating one another. Although originally dismissed as a fringe concept, it is now recognized as the key method by which some organelles have arisen.

More recently, Eugene Rosenberg and Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg presented research advancing the concept that the object of natural selection on genomes is not solely on the individual and its central genome but on the combination of a ‘host’ organism and the entire symbiotic community with which it is associated. From this concept of the hologenome, originally conceived by Richard Jefferson, an entirely robust and alternative narrative of evolution can be offered, Hologenomic Evolution Theory. In this theory, evolutionary development builds upon cellular interactions governed by immunological rules. Natural selection remains an important factor but is displaced from its central role.

virulence of many microbial pathogens, no matter the underlying cause. This correlates with the rich complexity and diversity of all ecologies in which pathogens thrive. So shifts in the distribution of vegetation, the dispersal and range of animal predators or their prey, or distortions in the variety, concentration or specific strains of vectoring insects or other disease-carrying organisms can all influence the transmission of pathogens or their relative abundance.

Support
Many researchers believe that this effect can be currently observed. For example, malaria[1] spreading to the highlands in Africa and the northward spread of West Nile Virus[2] in the United States has been linked to the changing distribution of disease-carrying mosquitoes relating to climate change. So, too, have shifts in the spread of dengue fever[3] in endemic areas.

A wide range of diseases are zoonotic in etiology so a shifting climate may enhance the likelihood of that cross-transmission or its virulence. There is evidence for just this type of consequential shifting pattern. Ecological variation has been ongoing over earth’s history, and that of man’s time on earth. Humans have been both victims of pathogens and carriers. For example, the loss of the North American large mammals like the woolly mammoth and saber-toothed tiger has been correlated by some researchers to a phenomenon termed hyperdisease[4]. In that instance, humans as carriers or our traveling companions, such as hunting dogs or domesticated animals, are thought to have introduced new pathogens or more virulent ones to an unprepared environment.

Response
How then should this affect our global response to climate issues? It must begin with increasing awareness among climate scientists and physicians. However, there should also be a redirection of scant available resources from unproved expensive projects of carbon capture and sequestration to productive research studying the patterns of communicable disease. This might mean evaluating and implementing better means of mosquito, tic, and rat control; sharpening our tracking of current patterns of communicable diseases; and aggressive research into improved prevention or therapies. All would yield substantial benefits with certainty, whether a shifting climate is consequential now or in the future.
–Bill Miller, MD

References
1.    Bouma MJ, van der Kaay HJ. The El Niño Southern Oscillation and the historic malaria epidemics on the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka: An early warning system for future epidemics? Trop Med Int Health 1996;1:86-96.
2.    Morin CW, Comrie AC. Regional and seasonal response of a West Nile virus vector to climate change. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2013;110:15620-15625.
3.    Hales S, de Wet Neil, Maindonald J, et al. Potential effect of population and climate changes on global distribution of dengue fever: An empirical model. Lancet 2002;360:830-834.
4.    MacPhee RDE, Marx PA. Lightning strikes twice: Blitzkrieg, hyperdisease, and global explanations of the late quaternary catastrophic extinctions. American Museum of Natural History. Accessed 13 June 2014. www.amnh.org/science/biodiversity/extinction/Day1/bytes/MacPheePres.html.

 

Lee Hotz in the Wall Street Journal (Feb. 14, 2014) quotes Justin Werfel, a staff scientist at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, “Every robot acts independently, but together they will end up building what you want”.

The experiment demonstrated that the robot swarm can build a variety of shaped structures such as castles and pyramids out of foam bricks. Each individual robot can autonomously build staircases to reach the higher levels of these structures. Simple programming rules permit forward, backward, up and down motion. Each robot can also sense the individual bricks that it carries and also the presence of nearby robots. Relatively complex structures can be constructed since the robots are smarter as a group than they are individually, and can recognize and correct some mistakes.

Although the design of this experiment was inspired by termites, the scientists might just as well have done their modeling utilizing cellular dynamics. Individual cells, too, act independently yet collaborate by using their own sensory apparatuses. Cells are aware of their surroundings, their cellular neighbors and even cells at a distance via sophisticated sensing and communication mechanism. These robots were programmed to follow very limited rules that allowed them to “respond to conditions around them and to each other.” 

Cells are easily capable of the same range of responses. Indeed, the rules for cells, just as for real termites, are not exclusively straightforward nor as limited as in this experiment. Their awareness is much more sophisticated and extends beyond their immediate surroundings. However this experiment, even though limited, demonstrates that collaboration based only upon simple rules and basic sensory awareness can enable complex engineering of structures totally unrelated to the design of the originating individuals units. There need be no organizing principle beyond rudimentary rules of interaction. Therefore, it can be appreciated that in the biologic realm, complexity can be the yield of this sort of uncomplicated collaboration and it is reasonable to assume that natural systems would respond in the same manner. As Steven Johnson has said and this experiment elaborates, “ It is not the network itself that is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they are connected to the network.” This is just as true for cells as it is for termites and humans. 

Indirectly then, the analogous power of natural genetic and cellular engineering by genetic aggregates and individual cells with limited awareness to create complex local environments is illustrated. That would be so even if cellular capacities were quite proscribed or comparable to the elementary rules devised by the researchers instead of the vastly broader and deeper capabilities that they possess. Constrained as these robots were, they were still able to build complex structures. Why would we doubt the correlative capacity of aware, linked and co-dependent cells to engineer biological results according to their own preferences, needs and limits? Nor should it be difficult to accept that all complex creatures have evolved and were elaborated by this same process, no different in kind than illustrated by this experiment. 

Collaboration, repeated at every level and at every scale, represents the fundamental process by which all the current biologic endpoints on this planet have been reached ………as hologenomic organisms. Every complex creature on this planet is one. There are no exceptions. Nor could there be if the fundamental pattern of evolutionary development is based on collaborative biological engineering across a broad spectrum of cells, each intent on serving its own aims but capable of working cooperatively to achieve those goals. Indirectly then, this experiment elegantly illuminates the inherent power of natural genetic and cellular engineering in biological processes. Our biological world is based on a system of collaboration and competition through cellular awareness, preference, and intentionality. Even limited as it must be solely to its microscopic scope and scale, its outputs are the wondrous creatures we see all around us.