The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [16]
Division of labor among the cells in the community offered an additional survival advantage. The efficiency it offered enabled more cells to live on less. Consider the old adage: “Two can live as cheaply as one.” Or consider the construction costs of building a two-bedroom single home versus the cost of building a two-bedroom apartment in a hundred-apartment complex. To survive, each cell is required to expend a certain amount of energy. The amount of energy conserved by individuals living in a community contributes to both an increased survival advantage and a better quality of life.
In American capitalism, Henry Ford saw the tactical advantage in the differentiated form of communal effort and employed it in creating his assembly line system of manufacturing cars. Before Ford, a small team of multiskilled workers would require a week or two to build a single automobile. Ford organized his shop so that every worker was responsible for only one specialized job. He stationed a large number of these differentiated workers along a single row, the assembly line, and passed the developing car from one specialist to the next. The efficiency of job specialization enabled Ford to produce a new automobile in ninety minutes rather than weeks.
Unfortunately, we conveniently “forgot” about the cooperation necessary for evolution when Charles Darwin emphasized a radically different theory about the emergence of life. He concluded 150 years ago that living organisms are perpetually embroiled in a “struggle for existence.” For Darwin, struggle and violence are not only a part of animal (human) nature but the principal “forces” behind evolutionary advancement. In the final chapter of The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, Or, The Preservation Of Favoured Races In The Struggle For Life, Darwin wrote of an inevitable “struggle for life” and that evolution was driven by “the war of nature, from famine and death.” Couple that with Darwin’s notion that evolution is random and you have a world, as poetically described by Tennyson, that can be characterized as “red in tooth and claw,” a series of meaningless, bloody battles for survival.
Evolution Without the Bloody Claws
Though Darwin is by far the most famous evolutionist, the first scientist to establish evolution as a scientific fact was the distinguished French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck. (Lamarck 1809, 1914, 1963) Even Ernst Mayr, the leading architect of “neo Darwinism,” a modernization of Darwin’s theory that incorporates twentieth-century molecular genetics, concedes that Lamarck was the pioneer. In his classic 1970 book, Evolution and the Diversity of Life, (Mayr 1976, page 227) Mayr wrote: “It seems to me Lamarck has a much better claim to be designated the ‘founder of the theory of evolution,’ as indeed he has by several French historians … he was the first author to devote an entire book primarily to the presentation of a theory of organic evolution. He was the first to present the entire system of animals as a product of evolution.”
Not only did Lamarck present his theory fifty years before Darwin, he offered a much less harsh theory of the mechanisms of evolution. Lamarck’s theory suggested that evolution was based on an “instructive,” cooperative interaction among organisms and their environment that enables life forms to survive and evolve in a dynamic world. His notion was that organisms acquire and pass on adaptations necessary for their survival in a changing environment. Interestingly, Lamarck’s hypothesis about the mechanisms of evolution conform to modern cell biologists’ understanding of how immune systems adapt to their environment as described above.
Lamarck’s theory was an early target of the Church. The notion that humans evolved from lower life forms was denounced as heresy. Lamarck was also scorned by his fellow scientists who, as creationists, ridiculed his theories. A German developmental biologist, August Weismann, helped propel Lamarck