Becoming Species

“There is religion when the sacred is distinguished from the profane”

- Emile Durkheim

Humans resist states of being at the heart of evolution: separation, isolation, freakishness, outlying but new species are born of weirdness, cataclysm, getting lost, change, mutation of molecule, cell, body, local environment and ecosystem. When the Earth moves - animals and plants evolve.  Continuity and comfort means equilibrium, balance, regularity, harmony, sameness. Nature does not embrace change unless change is vital for survival. Our nucleic acids battle efforts to change them 24/7. Most of this DNA / RNA change is bad and almost all is edited out of the genome prior to inheritance.

A species is a group of organisms that interbreed. Robins don’t interbreed with cardinals thus- two different species. Japanese people can and do interbreed successfully with caucasians thus they are the same species. All humans are the same species and there is only a single one-Homo sapiens. There are over 800,000 species of beetles, 20,000 species of bony fish.

Species evolve when and if they must otherwise they do not evolve. Species maintain their equilibrium over eons. A mosquito of today is almost identical to a mosquito that pestered the dinosaurs. There has been no evidence that a single higher animal has evolved in any way since Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” in 1861. Evolution, when it happens, is almost always abrupt on a geological scale, intensely slow in human terms.

Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould proposed their theory of Punctuated Equilibrium in 1974 asserting multicell organisms ( non-bacteria, non-virus, non-archaea) evolve when confronted with large environmental change such as an ice or heat age, grand geologic shifts-new islands and continents forming, a meteor impact’s negative effect on the atmosphere. This punctuation may take ten million years to play out giving rise to new species then stasis returns to this species for 100 or 500 million years. The fossil record confirms punctuated equilibrium. Stasis is data. Darwin proposed that all organisms are evolving continuously. This has been proven false. Organisms may change with each new generation ( your face is different than that of your parent) but change is not evolution. Evolution implies change for the better. DNA has evolved for four billion years to resist change - to edit mutation away from its double helix before conception. There is evidence for evolution of plants and animals over the past 3.5 billion years but it has not been continuous and the evidence itself is not at all continuous.

Pathways to speciation are many. During the 1960s bioscientist Lynn Margulis proposed the symbiotic path to species evolution where two different species merge creating a new, more formidable species. When the single-cell energy engine mitochondria merged with other, less energetic single cell organisms three billion years ago many new species of microorganism emerged. When proto-organ systems merged many good things happened within an organism: fluids were synthesized, pumped, filtered, properly timed and the creature remembered where the food lived.  Mergers and acquisitions were ( are?)  a key pathway to speciation. Organisms under great pressure forced to merge with one another in shrinking crowded conditions miles below global ice sheets, speciation occurring next to warm vents from deep within the Earth’s mantle. Population pressure - creatures breaking into one another’s skin and happy with the result. More energy, more motility, more durability, bigger teeth.

Three pathways, of many, to evolution:

1. Rolling the dice 1,000 times per hour under UV bombardment,  testing new combinations and features against all environments - intracell on up the hierarchy of systems out into the primordial ooze - the Darwin method: mutation followed by natural selection.
2.  Accidents of fate, genetic drift,  a population disperses throughout the realm, those creatures most remote find themselves on a broken off piece of continent, a new island where they live for eons in isolation from their fellows. Their genes have drifted, initiating evolution of new species. Natural selection was not the primary cause.
3.  Epigenetics - evolution occurs as DNA, RNA, histones, heritable proteins receive signals between every single cell division among 10 trillion cells throughout a higher organism’s reproductive years. Countless micro-events with evolutionary consequences at each cell division, once a week not at each lifetime. Evolution occurring as each cell divides not as each organism has more fit or less fit offspring. New information re: fitness relayed to the germline: eggs and sperm for inclusion in next year’s model. One thousand trillion evolutionary events per lifetime - not just an array of  random nucleotide mutations passed from parent to child. Non-stop evolutionary feedback-feedforward loops throughout trillions of moments in a single life.

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JB Questions and observations:

Reading: “Elementary Forms of Religious Life” - Emile Durkheim

4. Is a television a totem? Does television fill a totemic role in American ( Western) culture?  How about a laptop or an I-phone or a car?
5. Claude Levi-Strauss patterned his book “the Savage Mind” on Durkheim’s “The Elementary forms of Religious Life”. Both men used the same strategy of assembling published papers in anthropology-social science acting as clearing house for the ideas of many in neat, summaries that became foundational texts.
6. Types of american totemism within our religion of Capitalism: a.infototems: TV,laptop, I-phone b.Utilitotem; Washer, dryer, range, refrigerator-freezer c. Statustotem: auto, espresso machine
7. The quark as The God Particle is 100% totemism.
8. ToDo: Reinstate animal / plant totemism in USA. Assign each animal and plant species in the world to groups of school children investing them with the responsibility to care for their totem organism throughout their lives.
9. Why would one animal species select another species as a totem?
10. Note:  Durkheim espousing contextuality in 1912. Contextuality didn’t hit the realm of the built environment ( City planning and architecture) until 1960 in the work of Jane Jacobs. Have architects EVER been on the cutting edge of the ideas of a given era? Not after the era of the Gothic cathedral.
11. Did the thought of Ruskin and Morris have any direct effect upon Le Corbusier and Mies or was it always filtered through Frank Lloyd wright via the Wasmuth Portfolio? Can one get the full import of an idea second or third hand? That we can, forms the backbone of modern education.
12. Architecture coughs up its Jencksian history hairball in the mid-1970s lame swerve on hardcore French Postmodernism in the work of Charles Moore, Michael Graves and other pasticheurs of the time. Ughh, such a superficial, desolate and highly publicized dead end for architecture - suckered again.
13. If snowball Earth had an ice sheet 20 miles thick one billion years ago this must have had an additive effect upon mutational effects of UV radiation as warm pools at top of this high ice were exposed to sunlight at 20 miles up, beyond any filtering atmosphere. Did this high ice push exisitng atmosphere up with it or leave it behind?
14. JB neologism: “Stochastic Targeting”: to send a barrage of speculative detail. Target mind adjusts this barrage with details known to recipient so it appears that you were 80% correct instead of shooting in the dark.
15. Can a recessive gene become active during one’s lifespan if the dominant gene fails? How might an activated recessive gene attract RNA polymerase to begin midlife transcription? How does RNA polymerase know which is the dominant gene in the first place?
16. Sewall Wright gets a lot of credit for adding to our knowledge of evolution as a key generator of the Modern synthesis that combined Darwinism with modern genetics. In retrospect, is this credit deserved?  Was Wright seeing evolution at work with his guinea pigs or observing minor breeding changes?
17. Our dominant genes are expressed during fetal development affecting sex, height, eye and hair color and many metabolic processes. Do all 46 chromosomes come into play postnatally regarding such things as hormone production and all manner of transcription-translation regulatory process? why not? All 46 chromosomes are part of the chromatin. why would an RNA polymerase not wander over to a recessive gene and put it to work? Especially if the dominant gene was damaged or working inefficiently. Perhaps the distinction between dominant and recessive evaporates after fetal development allowing the environment to call all shots regarding which genes are active among all 40,000 genes not just the human haploid 20,000.
18. Genetic change has been conflated with, confused with evolution throughout the latter half of the 20th century and the 21st. Calling allele frequency change “evolution” is like calling a grain of pollen a pine tree - well…..it sort of is and sort of isn’t with a 99.9999 % chance that the pollen grain is just another allergen - a sneeze at most. Fisher, Haldane and Sewall Wright explored genetic change. that their theories have been framed as evolution was to jump to conclusions. The core notions of the Modern synthesis are about micro-evolution  - no evolution discernable / provable,  just variation, just change. Variation is not evolution. Discerning pathways of phenotypic change is not discerning pathways of evolution. The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis is not ALL wrong, just ALL too narrow.
19. Might a bacterium or a virus take a few nucleotides / base pairs from one species of mammal and insert this DNA from mammal One into mammal Two which is a different species from mammal One? Scenario:  Buffalo dying of a viral infection - 50% of his 30 trillion cells have this toxic viral DNA mixed with buffalo DNA in a diseased chromatin soup in 15 trillion cells. A mosquito bites this dying buffalo then it bites a man on his balls infecting a few million germ cells / sperm / gametes with both viral DNA and buffalo DNA, any notable consequences?
20.  Natural selection does not “cause” evolution any more than an academy award “causes” a fine motion picture or a Nobel Prize “causes” brilliant research. Natural Selection is an outcome not a cause.
21. Genetic drift explains sports dynasties  - see: Roger Penske and four-wheel genetic drift.
22. Investigate founder effects on JB “The Ugly Gene” in New England Settlers-17th century Puritans.
23. Evolutionary biologist Ronald Fisher, a Darwinian gradualist - key player in Modern Evolutionary Synthesis misconstrued the rate,time and degree of the evolution of animal complexity. Fisher was fooled by outward appearances as 90% of vital biochemical pathways were in place before the Cambrian Explosion at 550 million years ago. All else has been biochemical window dressing, couture for bacteria bags: mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds i.e. experiments in fashion, trivial in scope. Compare the number of microorganisms to the number of multicell organisms on Earth today. Fisher actually believed a bear is different than a snake.
24. What was the last common ancestor of the chloroplast and the mitochondria?
25. Test for correlation of high fructose corn sweetener to mitochondrial fission at fat cells and at kidney, hepatic and gut tissue.
26. Curing a person of cancer is like curing the Earth of humans. what would be an effective strategy?

1. introduce unfriendly microorganism
2. add excess heat or cold interrupting metabolism
3. add dust to interfere with breathing
4. eliminate food supply

20. How does one target a single species? what is unique about this cancer family of cells? What is unique about this organism? In humans - the neocortex
21. At cancer cells  interfere with mitochondrial energy production, dissolve cancer cell membrane, dissolve cancer cell nuclear membrane.
22. Is the cell outer membrane made of identical lipid bilayer as its nuclear membrane?
23. Age-old problem: how to direct cancer battle to cancer cell mitochondria only?
24. Do different tissues have unique mitochondrial DNA? Is liver mito DNA different from that in lungs,heart or kidney?
25. Review DNA/RNA methylations - differences in various tissue cells. How is a hepatocyte mitochondrial methylation different from a lung cancer cell mitochondria methylation?
26. To do: Examine 1,000 different cancer cell types to determine differences in their mitochondrial DNA/RNA epigenetic modifications.
27. This must all be old hat: Target DNA-RNA promoters that are unique at cancer mitochondria to interrupt energy/metabolic process thus killing the cell - starve cancer cells of their glucose.
28. Do brain tumor cells have unique mitochondria from the brain area tissues of origin. Does each brain area generate unique tumors each with its own signature?
29. What is the cancer equivalent to the effects of disruption of neocortical function, neocortical links with brainstem, striatum etc. intra-cortical links re: sensory perception. Inter-cortical links re: efferent signaling between neocortex and hypothalamus, thalamus, globus pallidus, putamen, pons, medulla, cerebellum, hippocampus? Cancer-human analogy.
30. Cancer cure? 24/7 low level ultrasound or uv/infrared light ( something besides traditional radiation-chemo) bombardment geared to upsetting cancer cell mitochondria reproduction i,e, cell division / proliferation. to do: determine quantum level electrical processes/pathways at mitochondria. Halt methylase and or polymerase proliferation.
31. bio-friendly coated Nano pulsing device inserted into tumor-wireless operation with belt battery pack. Call it the BQMD: Blake Quantum Mitochondrial Disruptor.
32. Cure cancer by disrupting RER (rough endoplasmic reticulum) adhesion at ribosomes during translation to disrupt lipid production and thus disrupting cell membrane formation. Reverse the hydrophilic property at carcinomal lipid membrane. If there is no hydrophila there will be no cell wall - get to the root.
33. Cure cancer by control of TOR target -  rapamycin regulation of cell growth. TORC2 regulates cell surface area by influencing lipid production and intracellular turgor. Interrupt TORC2 transcription, translation or transport.
34. Cure cancer by stopping golgi apparatus from packaging proteins for export to adjacent / daughter cancer cells.
35. Cure cancer by inhibiting normal cell function at any and or all organelles and all biosynthetic, transcription, translation and lipid production one organelle at a time.. disrupt one-disrupt all. determine the most fundamental metabolite and disrupt it with a wavelength of sound or light.

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January 25, 2015    10:53 am