James Barham introduces James Shapiro (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, August 17, 2015, 23:21 (3385 days ago) @ David Turell

Barham thinks Shapiro's contributions to understanding genetics is extremely important:-http://jamesabarham.com/my-blog/34-seeing-past-darwin-ii-james-a-shapiro-"A molecular biologist at the University of Chicago by the name of James A. Shapiro recently published a masterly synthetic work which constitutes the most substantial contribution to date to post-Darwinian thinking in contemporary biology.(1)-The volume in question is entitled Evolution: A View from the 21st Century (FT Press, 2011), and it is simply stunning in every respect.-***- "the importance of bringing the insights of Shapiro and others to a wider audience can scarecely be exaggerated. Much in our culture depends upon the public's being made aware that Darwinian theory as standardly interpreted is intellectually bankrupt.(2) And little that I have encountered communicates this fact so well as the work of James A. Shapiro.-***-"Throughout the whole remarkable series of Huff Post essays, Shapiro stresses the importance of a key concept for understanding how both life and evolution work---"natural genetic engineering." While the technical details of this phenomenon can be forbidding, the basic idea is simple enough. In a nutshell, the phrase "natural genetic engineering" refers to cells' ability to "reprogram" their genomes as necessary---that is to say, purposefully---in order to meet changed environmental conditions.-***-"How do cells with finite DNA, and finite coding capacity, produce a virtually infinite variety of antibodies? The answer is that certain immune cells (B cells) become rapid evolution factories. They generate antibodies with effectively limitless diversity while preserving molecular structures needed to interact with other parts of the immune system.-"Immune cells achieve both diversity and regularity in antibody structures. They accomplish this by a targeted yet flexible process of natural genetic engineering: they cut and splice DNA.(2/6) . . .-"Three remarkable things about [two particular types of natural genetic engineering] are explicitly excluded from the prevailing philosophy of genetic change. First, they are adaptive and purposeful genome changes. Second, they are functionally targeted. Third, for [one of the types], targeting involves intercellular signals that depend on how other cells in the immune system perceive a particular infection.-"If immune cells can do all the above, is there any scientific reason we would assume that other cells cannot do the same? Coupling DNA restructuring to transcription is of major significance. All cells can target transcription to functionally relevant sites in the genome. Given that the immune system is how evolution evolved rapid protein evolution, should we not look to it for clues about basic evolutionary processes?(4/3)-***-"From these quotes, the reader can see that Shapiro does not mince words. He knows the vision of evolution he proposes is revolutionary---it does not "extend" the standard Darwinian account of evolution, it completely overturns it---and he is not afraid to say so.-"But what does "natural genetic engineering" really amount to?-"Clearly, it cannot be explained by natural selection, because it is the motor of all morphological and physiological variation, and thus is presupposed by the concept of natural selection. On Shapiro's view, natural selection is reduced to a superficial description of the evolutionary process, not an explanation of anything of much interest.
 (my bold)