The Lost World - Michael Crichton [91]
“Okay . . .”
“Second, there’s the coordination problem. If you believe the current theory, then all the wonderful complexity of life is nothing but the accumulation of chance events—a bunch of genetic accidents strung together. Yet when we look closely at animals, it appears as if many elements must have evolved simultaneously. Take bats, which have echolocation—they navigate by sound. To do that, many things must evolve. Bats need a specialized apparatus to make sounds, they need specialized ears to hear echoes, they need specialized brains to interpret the sounds, and they need specialized bodies to dive and swoop and catch insects. If all these things don’t evolve simultaneously, there’s no advantage. And to imagine all these things happen purely by chance is like imagining that a tornado can hit a junkyard and assemble the parts into a working 747 airplane. It’s very hard to believe.”
“Okay,” Thorne said. “I agree.”
“Next problem. Evolution doesn’t always act like a blind force should. Certain environmental niches don’t get filled. Certain plants don’t get eaten. And certain animals don’t evolve much. Sharks haven’t changed for a hundred and sixty million years. Opossums haven’t changed since dinosaurs became extinct, sixty-five million years ago. The environments for these animals have changed dramatically, but the animals have remained almost the same. Not exactly the same, but almost. In other words, it appears they haven’t responded to their environment.”
“Maybe they’re still well adapted,” Arby said.
“Maybe. Or maybe there’s something else going on that we don’t understand.”
“Like what?”
“Like other rules that influence the outcome.”
Thorne said, “Are you saying evolution is directed?”
“No,” Malcolm said. “That’s Creationism and it’s wrong. Just plain wrong. But I am saying that natural selection acting on genes is probably not the whole story. It’s too simple. Other forces are also at work. The hemoglobin molecule is a protein that is folded like a sandwich around a central iron atom that binds oxygen. Hemoglobin expands and contracts when it takes on and gives up oxygen—like a tiny molecular lung. Now, we know the sequence of amino acids that make up hemoglobin. But we don’t know how to fold it. Fortunately, we don’t need to know that, because if you make the molecule, it folds all by itself. It organizes itself. And it turns out, again and again, that living things seem to have a self-organizing quality. Proteins fold. Enzymes interact. Cells arrange themselves to form organs and the organs arrange themselves to form a coherent individual. Individuals organize themselves to make a population. And populations organize themselves to make a coherent biosphere. From complexity theory, we’re starting to have a sense of how this self-organization may happen, and what it means. And it implies a major change in how we view evolution.”
“But,” Arby said, “in the end, evolution still must be the result of the environment acting on genes.”
“I don’t think it’s enough, Arb,” Malcolm said. “I think more is involved—I think there has to be more, even to explain how our own species arose.”
“About three million years ago,” Malcolm said, “some African apes that had been living in trees came down to the ground. There was nothing special about these apes. Their brains were small and they weren’t especially smart. They didn’t have claws or sharp teeth for weapons. They weren’t particularly strong, or fast. They were certainly no match for a leopard. But because they were short, they started standing upright on their hind legs, to see over the tall African grass. That’s how it began. Just some ordinary apes, looking out over the grass.
“As time went on, the apes stood upright more and more of the time. That left their hands free to do things. Like all apes, they were tool-users. Chimps, for example,