Strolling Round With My Very Best Friend

Long and boring bit – mostly for me.

The gulls outside are squawking in time to the music (clue above) and driving home yesterday I saw someone struggling with a disability shuffling exactly in time to Zazu. These things make you think that the machinery of the world is linked and that something has got inside the works. We know that these sort of things do not really happen; it's just that they appear to do so. Faith is very much a belief in the linking of things through one consciousness though I am not sure that most modern religious leaders believe in the total control over all things by one entity - the things which happen in the world which warrant us questioning the goodness of the creator have removed the idea of omnipotence as a genuine belief. It is far easier to think of the complexity of things, right up to my ability to write this (sounds pompous I know but you don't need to look at whizzy philosophers or mathematicians to see some complexity that has simply evolved) as simple products of the bringing together of simple components.

My wife and I had one of our periodical discussions about a scientific matter when I started about the idea that every living human can be traced back to one early human (and further to one single shrew or one of any other of the myriad species between us and the slime moulds). I didn’t understand it when the discussion started (as I said here a few days ago) but I soon did as I had to clear the ideas in my own head before being able to get them across. The bottom line is that a mutation that leads to a new trait and hence eventually to new species (though the boundaries between species are always blurred) happens in one single individual (either a parent or a child). The individual with the new trait, if it does not kill them as so many mutations do, will breed with other individuals of the species and that new trait stands any offspring in a better position to survive so the new trait will tend to propagate through the entire species. You can actually ignore all this guff because it is obvious that the trait has to be passed down through the various generations. It may not be clear when written down but it is certainly clear in my head.

As part of this, I tried some analogies regarding the mutation. My wife (I suspect playing devil’s advocate) questioned why the mutation happened in just one individual; why can the same mutation not happen in more than one? At this point I suddenly saw how the mutations are distinct from the traits they produce. It is tempting to think of cause and effect here, the mutations cause the new trait – well they do but it is the passage of time after the mutation that allows the trait to propagate because it gives an advantage to the mutated individuals. You can pick my analogy apart if you like but I likened DNA to all the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica laid out on the ground while every year a plane flew over it and loosed a single drop of ink over it from high altitude. A useful mutation would correspond to that single drop of ink making a meaningful and useful alteration to the text of the book. Most drops would either miss entirely or cause gibberish. Sometimes they could fatally change the meaning giving a completely wrong view of a large part of human knowledge. Rarely they would cause a change in meaning that would increase or enhance that knowledge.

Having said all this, the mutations do reoccur. We have convergent evolution where the same traits are brought about in completely different species. I seem to remember that the eye has evolved many times throughout evolution, though of course, the eyes of all vertebrates have arisen from the same original structure. The mutations are not the same genes but they cause the same trait to be propagated.

As you can tell, I am deep in The Ancestor’s Tale. Richard Dawkins has suggested that mathematically challenged readers skip the pages I am on at the moment and I have to say that I am tempted. It sent me to sleep last night and nearly did so again this morning. Roll on page 118!