Wagner book review-1-Arrival of the Fittest, the new book by Andreas Wagner, 2014, is unusual, in that it is filled with anecdotal stories about his own career and relationship to co-workers, and side comments from the world's literature, movies, etc., used in his text to illustrate a point, and to make him seem friendly and likeable. He is. The book is fun to read. -But it is also very incomplete. In any discussion of evolution of life by genetic means, origin of life must be included as part of the original continuum that sets the stage. He discusses it in a glib way inferring that starting of life is not that difficult an event, considering all the known sources of organic molecules. He refers to simple molecules in space, in meteorites, caused by lightning, and life starting in hydrothermal vents, on clays, etc. He leaves out of his discussion any of the skeptical comments by folks like Robert Shapiro (Origins), i.e., the problem of chirality (3-D handedness). He admits that a simple metabolism had to come first, but then immediately jumps into an RNA world as the only real solution. Early RNA must replicate accurately and perfectly to get to life. He admits that so far only a 14 base RNA does perfect replication, but blandly assumes larger ones can be built in a lab. And that is because his entire book takes off from there to describe what his lab does in computer research on gene circuits controlling each other and modifying searches for new proteins, part of this based on knock-out studies of genes, assuming a start from an RNA-world. He briefly mentions that DNA carries information, and goes no further in proposing where that information might come from, or how newly-found functional protein is able to automatically carry useful information.-He describes the basic patterns of metabolism in all animals: the ADP-ATP energy system, the citric acid cycle, and the standard RNA/DNA genomes. These ‘universal standards', as he puts it, are necessary to establish a beginning for evolution to then develop further as life started. Then innovations can appear. But he wisely shows that the search space for new useful protein is enormous. A 100 amino acid protein chain with 20 different amino acids available has 10^130 possibilities of sequence, not counting the necessary folding to create function. Much of the research is done through computer programs with human scientific assumptions about RNA, and he is sure GIGO isn't part of his results. “Science can explain general principals of innovation even if it cannot predict an individual innovation”. That's fine, but life has to pick the individual, so we are still back to hunt-and-peck searching, although he does show a way of searching that might be faster.-He proposes gene circuits to do the hunting. These are linked genes working with each other. As an example the HOX gene circuit has 40 genes, resulting in 10^700 possible arrangements in searching. With this vast number they should turn up something useful more quickly than random mutations. And he next turns to the ability to self-organize, strongly proposing the genome can self-organize, an idea strongly supported by the Santa Fe group (Stuart Kauffman's computer work) to which he favorably refers.
He describes his gene circuits, “self-assembled organic molecules---hint at a deep unity between the material world of biology and the conceptual world of mathematics and computation”.
To which I say amen. He concludes: " We learn that life's creativity draws from a source older. than life, and perhaps older than time".