The Mermaid’s Tale: Four Billion Years of Cooperation in the Making of Living Things

320 Pages·24.244 MB·English

by  Kenneth M. Weiss, Anne V. Buchanan

The Mermaid’s Tale

THE MERMAID’S TALE
Four Billion Years of Cooperation
in the Making of Living Things
KENNETH M. WEISS
ANNE V. BUCHANAN
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2009
Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weiss, Kenneth M.
The mermaid’s tale : four billion years of cooperation in the making
of living things / Kenneth M. Weiss, Anne V. Buchanan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-674-03193-7 (alk. paper)
1. Life—Origin. 2. Evolution (Biology) 3. Natural selection.
I. Buchanan, Anne V. II. Title.
QH325.W43 2009
576.8—dc22 2008037860
To our spouses,
for their patience and understanding
as we wrote this book

Contents
Preface ix
part one The Time of Life: A Broadening Perspective 1
1 Life as History 3
2 Opening the Pentagon 8
3 Principles of Life 19
4 Inheritance with Memory 42
5 Walking down Memory Lane 68
part two The Logic of Life: Complexity Made Simply 87
6 Cells as Cytospecies 89
7 Life on the Devo Scale: Cytospeciation and the Logic
of Development 111
8 Life on the Eco Scale: Directed Change from a
Threatening, Unpredictable World 138
9 Life on the Eco Scale: Making Sense
of Complexity 155
part three The Consistency of Life: EcoDevoEvo 193
10 Life on the Evo Scale: Form Emerges
in Many Ways 195
11 The Cooperative Genome 223
12 The Legacy of Cooperation 236
Appendix A.Some of the Codes Contained in
DNA and RNA: Appendix to Chapter 4 251
Appendix B.The HoxCode and Axial Patterning:
Appendix to Chapter 7 257
Appendix C.The Logic of Image Detection:
Appendix to Chapter 9 261
Notes 265
Suggested Reading by General Category 269
References 283
Index 293
Preface
This book is a biography of life. No one knows exactly when the first
chemical stirrings that we call life arose but, whatever the exact
birthday—and who’s really counting?—we will use 4 billion years as a tidy
approximation.
In 1858 Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced their
ideas on how new species of plants and animals came into existence, and
continue to do so, each adapted to its way of life. The ideas excited some
and threatened others, but the world took notice and there was to be no
looking back. To some historians of science, the insight about the evolution
of life, whose course follows simple principles, was the most brilliant idea
ever to colonize a human mind.
Life at its essence is a dynamic cauldron of molecular interaction and
change through time. Evolutionary theory in its classical form is about the
effects of competition and natural selection, acting slowly and gradually
over eons of time, from life’s birth to its current “adult” stages on earth.
Darwin and Wallace showed that life was a history, and they offered a
mechanistic explanation for how adapted organisms could arise—or
“evolve.” Their work was important in liberating biology from religious
views, which held that animal and plant species must have been brought
into being by instantaneous divine creation.
However, applying evolutionary theory to billions of years of history
can, in subtle but seductive ways, compress unimaginably immense time