Open Source Genetics

Charles Darwin was the first person to ever use the legal term "inheritance" to describe the passing of (parts of) both parents genomes down to their natural children.

Darwin's unexpectedly smooth success with his theories of Evolution came about because he let the upper class middle class - people like himself - have their cake and eat it too.

His theory reconciled the competing values of social stability versus social mobility, at a time of heightened social instability in Victorian England.

Basically the upper middle class wanted enough social mobility to let their family rise to the top and then enough social stability to let them stay there forever !

On average, the many children of typical Victorian parents who had earned their wealth the hard way, held onto their exalted social position in the second generation merely because of their parents' wealth, rather than through all of them emulating their parents' brains and work ethic.

And this made the Victorian society very uncomfortable.

But now these kids could claim that they had inherited dad's genetic strength in brainpower and work power, not merely his money, and use this to account for their exalted social status.

His genes made them the fittest and it was his genes, not his money, than made their survival at the top of the social scale a inevitable fact of natural law.

To repeat, in the vertical form of genetics as practised by all life but the microbes, Mom and Dad's superior genes were not for global sharing, but for their natural children alone.

Inheritance talk extended to copyrights and patents 

In the same way, any inventions those superior genes might dream up remained their inventor's alone - in the form of copyrights, patents and brand trademarks.

Narrow, vertical inheritance of genes and patents: the genetics and the economics of exclusion.

Those that had power kept right on gaining more power - those who had money kept right on making more money.

A self-replicating aristocracy : gated community genetics : the one percent, the WASPs.

Thinking Like A Macrobe

But in a time of global crisis (say WWII or climate change) relying upon the brains and hard work of just the one percent may be a recipe for global disaster : we need the brains and hard work of all of the other 99%.

So should humans look to Nature, pick between the vertical "gated" genetics of the dinosaurs or the horizontal "open source" genetics of the microbes ?

The 'Appeal to Nature' , the claim that something comes from Nature, to support a human "should" argument, is always intellectually suspect.

Philosophers call this appeal a Fallacy, one of their worst sins in the practise of argumentation.

But if we nevertheless politely insist that we should at least look at the statistical evidence from nearly four billion years of Life on Earth, we can see that statistically, the giant dinosaurs were much much less successful in evolutionary terms than the tiny microbes.

We them must struggle to account for this unexpected result that seemingly refutes the claim that 'Bigger is always Better' and 'God always on the side of the Big Battalions'.

It won't hurt, I argue, for us to see if the very different forms of genetic inheritance between these two types of beings might account for their widely varying success rate in times of global crisis.

A global crisis, I would argue, is not normal - by definition.

Normal, conventional, ways of thinking, normal conventional leaders just can't adapt quick enough or engage deeply enough.

HGT

We need to pull in all the oddball ideas from all the oddballs out there - just as the microbes do when crisis and stress makes them deliberately get careless in their DNA copying - suddenly producing lots of totally new mutated genes.

In sufficient numbers, one of those many oddball new genes will produce the needed solution.

Next, the individual microbes release these new genes into the environment for any other microbe to take up, adapt or to pass on in turn to other microbes.

And so forth - its called HGT.

And HGT has let the microbes live almost four billion years here on Earth. 

By contrast, the dinosaurs, like the WASP one percent who run our world today, could only act in times of crisis in the narrow silos of conventional rote.

But truly new ideas come from truly new people.

"Yes, and not our kind of people," sniffs the one percent as they quickly reject these ideas, simply because they came from a woman wearing a niqab.

"Thinking Like A Microbe"

So only the growing Open Source movement, which basically by-passes the mental gatekeeping of the one percent, lets the ideas of the other 99% see the light of day and spread via the internet all around the world, to anyone who can use and improve upon them.

Only by moving to Open Source thinking, only by 'thinking like a microbe', will we solve our environmental crisis and help prevent the sixth mass extinction.

If not, prepare to quickly become the next dinosaurs, Humanity !

HGT a model for humanity's survival ?

Incredibly small, usually immobile, fragile bags of mostly water : they hardly sounds like creatures capable of giving advanced human civilization, circa the 21st century, a vital formula for surviving the worst the Cosmos can throw at us.

But for almost four billion years, the supposedly 'stupid' and 'unfit' tiny microbes have not just survived but dominated life on Earth.

I follow people like Dr Martin Henry Dawson and *Dr Lois Almon who, way back before WWII, believed that much of the credit for this unlikely survival success lies in something that these small and the weak creatures have that we big and smart people do not have.

And that is a process we now call HGT, but which Dawson first established under the name of 'bacterial transformation'.

HGT stands for Horizontal Gene Transfers --- 'the genetics of inclusion'.

It usually involves the release of bits of an individual microbe's personal DNA genome into the environment, to be taken up potentially by any other type of microbe near by, who can then pass it on to other species of microbes who are both physically and genetically far more remote from the original individual microbe.

(By contrast, most big creatures can only have access to the DNA genome of their mother and father - not trillions times trillions of other individual microbe genomes.)

The net result is a vast global lending library of survival ideas, with the key concept that every single microbe is both a borrower and an author : "With help from all, there is hope for all".

"What's the Gen ?"

I have a weakness for WWII ER (enlisted ranks) slang and one of the best was the constant question at a time when rumours rather than hard facts dominated life.

ERs from all services generally greeted each other not with "how you doing?" but rather with an urgent "what's the Gen?".

North Americans today in peacetime might re-phrase it as "what's the scoop?", "what's the score?" or "what's the buzz?".

'Gen' was short for information that might be vital for survival, whether merely surviving the chickenshit of daily military life at the rear bases or surviving bad assignments out on the frontlines.

While we humans sometimes pass valuable "Gen" from person to person, microbes have always passed valuable "Genes" from one to another.

Over almost four billion years, microbes have excelled at producing endless numbers of seemingly 'unfit' and useless gene mutations and at allowing microbes with these oddball genes to survive and reproduce - albeit often at less than optimal population levels.

These genes, like all microbe genes, are routinely released into the environment, for all other microbes to potentially take up with HGT.

Most of the time, there is no point to either the mutated new genes or to their takeup by microbe species genetically far away from the species and strain that first produced them.

Antibiotic resistance is merely the best known example of HGT

But when a new crisis suddenly emerges anywhere in the world - say a new deadly antibiotic produced for the benefit of humanity - in only a handful of years all microbe populations around the world have taken up and then 'expressed' a hitherto obscure (but ancient) gene that offers sturdy resistance to this human antibiotic.

But the weird useless/unfit genes can vary all over the map - why bother with a gene that allows microbes to go into a suspended state of existence when the environment freezes over for thousands of years ?

But that turns out to be very useful when the Earth has become a frozen solid iceball, almost overnight, several times in its history.

And so on and so - no environmental crisis in four billion years (and there has been some real hellish ones) has yet succeeded in wiping the microbes out.

By contrast, evolutionary history suggests that big creatures, practising 'the genetics of exclusion', have had no luck surviving even a small environmental crisis.

We aren't going to survive the latest environmental crisis, not unless we give up the dogwhistle scientific politics of first giving everyone offering to help a blood test to find out if they are WASP enough to be taken seriously.

We need a global coalition of all possible talents, need to make the biggest of all possible Big tents, to get us through this crisis.

This blog is all about creating a human equivalent to microbial HGT...

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*Dr Almon thought HGT might account for sudden variations in the nitrogen fixing abilities of bacteria and since almost all life would cease without these efforts, she thought it was well worth looking into.

As a blogger who loves his grub, I fully agree .

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The days when we can afford to let the WASP males, perhaps 1% of the world's population, rule (and ruin) this planet are over.

The crisis we face is such way too big, way to existential.

And the WASPs are fading fast - it sometime seems easier to get two Pandas to breed than to get two WASPs to breed.

Instead  of relying exclusively upon their fading numbers, we need the biggest possible of Big Tents, a coalition of 'all the possible talents', 'all hands on deck', if we are to come up with the creative solutions we so desperately need.

What we don't need is blood tests at every frontier guard post to determine if a person is "Pure Laine" enough, Aryan enough, WASP enough, before being allowed in to make their case.

Good ideas that will let humanity survive for a few more thousand years can emerge just as well from under niqabs as those that leisurely filter out from the gated communities and exclusive country clubs.