Activity

I notice that the Deep Time Journey Network has a new tag line, “Empowering Emergence”. One of the mysteries of deep time is where and how life (a process of cellular metabolism) was empowered to emerge. Another puzzle is how life and the Earth have shaped one another over the past 3200+ million years. There has been one theory of how cellular organisms have evolved for the past 70 years, the Modern Synthesis. It is said that all models (a theory is a type of model) are wrong, but some are useful. The Modern Synthesis has been useful. It has produced advances in scientific understanding and technology. It has also produced results showing that it is no longer sufficient to fully explain the many ways in which evolution (emergence) is empowered. The Modern Synthesis only envisioned the accumulation of random mutations in the genome that produced novel traits. Traits that improved the chance of survival persisted while offspring without the improvement were eliminated in the competition for survival, a process called natural selection. There have been many other explanations for processes that contribute to evolution that have been around (in some cases for over a century) that were ignored or given short shrift by evolutionary biology because they did not fit within the Modern Synthesis. Around 2010, a tipping point was reached when the empirical evidence for these additional processes required a new model for evolution. The Modern Synthesis, which had been useful, was no longer sufficient to explain all of the new processes which had been discovered and conclusively proven. This new evolutionary model still does not have a name. It isn’t just additional processes that have been revealed. It is the way in which these processes are conceptualized as part of what is called Systems Biology, rather than from a overly reductionist and gene-centered view, that results in a radically different model for evolution. I have posted a link to a lecture by Denis Noble which explains how organisms and cells empower emergence to cope with stresses of their constantly changing (evolving) environments. This is a must-see for anyone interested in deep time and our evolution from common bacterial ancestors on a constantly changing Earth over more than 3200 million years.