Introduction I (Evo21): A Fresh Look at the Basics of Evolution in the New Century

"How does novelty arise in evolution?" is a key question the author concentrates the reader's attention. It is important to realize that evolution is all about change. Thus, in order to have a rigorous empirical foundation for evolution one needs to show what changes occur and how.

So far, all speculative mostly analytical studies of evolution considered exclusively selection, which made the area half-empirical: whenever anything new was found (fossil, mechanism etc.) it was all laid down on the existing model of interpretation of the material, however, the model itself was not critically considered, it was believed to be true. This book, on contrary, considers the extensive empirical evidence on how organisms actively change themselves, thus, tries to reconsider the foundations of the interpreting model. Moreover, the author puts himself on the solid grounds of true empirical studies by reviewing the factual information of molecular biology.

"Innovation, not selection, is the critical issue in evolutionary change. Without variation and novelty, selection has nothing to act upon."

Selection comes from the environment and we know that all things are shaped by their environment. However, this shaping varies from one thing to another depending upon the internal properties and their responsiveness to the external guiding stimuli. These internal properties were ever the main source of speculation in evolution studies. Namely, interspersed here and there with seldom evidence of randomness (which could be simply lack of knowledge) in these properties the speculation was that pure random forces are responsible for the change in biological matter.

Especially, the inherited novelty was believed to be pure accidental, which was further reinforced with discovery of DNA and its replication process prone of mistakes.

Darwin wrote in his Origin of Species... (Chapter 6): "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case."

Is it possible to demonstrate that? Is there any way to do that? I think we have to first determine what is "numerous" and "slight" in any particular case of a "complex organ" in order to answer the question. Importantly, the question itself is not some sort of a philosophical sophistication known beforehand to be unprovable practically, it is a sort of question which one can answer positively, at least, one could show few and significant modifications leading to a complex organ and not requiring millions of years. And that would suffice... So, Charles Darwin does not play a sophistry game, but rather shows (scientific) modesty in his contribution.

We have to admit along with the author that the accidental, random nature of heredity is still prevailing wisdom in both professional and non-professional realms.

The eagerness with which biologists insist on the random nature of heredity and change, while not surprising in the context of ideological debates, is very suspicious in the light of much empirical evidence showing that mutagenetic process has specific patterns and activities at the level of altering DNA sequence.

This further led to unacceptable dogmatism in modern scientific thought where any non-random adaptive function was considered "heresy" in the official intellectual circles. "But capacity to change is itself adaptive." If an organism can faster and more effectively change itself in response to the changing environment, it gets inevitable advantage over the others, and this can be subject to selection as well.

"The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable. Our current ideas about evolution have to incorporate this basic fact of life."

First, the organically generated heredity received appreciation in cytogenetics (especially, through works of Barbara McClintock) in 1930-1960, before we got into the DNA era, which, when it came, only reinforced the importance of the phenomenon and showed its universality among all living organisms. "Natural genetic engineering" was confirmed to have major roles in manipulating and reshaping the DNA molecules.

This is the first place where the notion of "natural genetic engineering" is introduced. As with synthetic or human made genetic engineering, where we can modify properties of the organisms by direct manipulating of its DNA and accompanying molecules, the natural genetic engineering is an ability of living organisms themselves to manipulate (actively change) their DNA. Quite fascinating the property was hardly acknowledged in the higher circles of the scientific community, even today it is sometimes unacceptable heresy when presented to biologists.