Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [84]
With typical brazen spirit, Margulis later accused her detractors of laziness in their search for evidence. Why study only what is currently alive, she asks, when the fossil record gives us millions of years of data? ‘Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge, and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that … they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date,’ Margulis says. Animals, she points out, ‘are very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution’s creativity’.
Margulis has won few friends. In 2009, in a move that must have lost her most of her remaining admirers, she pulled the prestigious US National Academy of Sciences through the dirt and forced it to change some of its time-honoured – though extremely unscientific (one might even say anarchic) – practices. Thanks to an outcry raised by Margulis’s ‘abuse’ of the system, members of the National Academy can no longer sidestep proper academic criticism and push a research paper, unresisted, through the peer review process. Some might say that, in the case of the National Academy vs marine biologist Donald Williamson, Margulis has done science a favour.
Donald Williamson is an Eeyore among scientists. In his own words, he is ‘from a short-lived family, and on a straight-line course for posthumous recognition’. He doesn’t have much luck, either. Shortly after he used these words to tell Lynn Margulis what he thought of his prospects, he slipped and fell while collecting specimens. Williamson, who is eighty-nine years old as I write, is now confined to a wheelchair. Whether he’s right about the posthumous recognition, only time will tell. But it certainly doesn’t look as though the recognition will arrive anytime soon. In 2009, one of Williamson’s scientific peers dismissed his ideas as ‘the most stupid thing that has ever been proposed’. Another suggested that a paper Williamson had submitted for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences would be better suited for the National Enquirer.
In one respect, though, Williamson is lucky. If people ever do the experiments he has suggested, and find that his ‘astonishing and unfounded’ ideas (another critic) are right, no one will be able to deny his claim to priority. The stink Lynn Margulis kicked up in her promotion of Williamson’s work has made sure of that. In fact, it is hard to believe that Margulis didn’t do this deliberately. As a member of the National Academy of Sciences, she was able to fast-track papers she likes through the peer review process. As long as she could find two reviewers who also liked the paper, the NAS pretty much guaranteed that they would publish it in the Proceedings.
That’s how Williamson managed to publish his notion that the bodies of butterflies and their caterpillars have come down different evolutionary pathways. His claim is that the stark and mysterious differences between butterflies and caterpillars – and many other creatures that go through a larval stage before entering adulthood in a completely different form – are the result of a hybridisation in their distant evolutionary past. Sometime, long ago, a female creature’s eggs were accidentally fertilised by sperm from another species. The result was the development of a species with two very different phases of life. In one phase the genome of one of the ancestral species controls what the body looks like. Then, at some trigger moment, the other species’ genome takes over.
At first glance, it’s a compelling idea. Take the starfish that biologists know as Luidia sarsi, for example. Luidia, like most