Researcher Ariel Fernández argues in “Our evolutionary Achilles heel” (ABC News, October 11, 2011):
Our biological functions are exquisitely regulated and resilient, owing to complicated webs of interactions. Unlike other species, we seem to be endowed with willpower and intellect, hence we are capable of modifying the environment to buffer the effects of our decreasing fitness.
Be that as it may, we may be doomed as a species precisely because of the way in which our complexity arose. Paraphrasing the science writer Philip Ball, nature seems to have activated a time bomb, and our complexity is only a short-term fix.
The evidence?
It is well known that the number of human genes is deceptively small, merely one order of magnitude larger than that of, say, rice.
If the structure of the proteins is conserved across species, where is our complexity coming from? Better still, in what sense are we more complex?
Arguing that
protein-protein interactions, a hallmark of complexity, are actually promoted by random drift, the evolutionary force behind the protein degradation process.
, he concludes,
So, it seems, complexity is not really naturally selected, but instead arises as a short-term fix to the effects of selection inefficiency.
Perhaps the long-term evolutionary cost of our complexity is too high, with our survival as a species ultimately depending on our ability to mitigate its cost through increasingly arduous therapeutic solutions. Let’s hope we pass the test.
Thoughts?
That last point begs a good many questions. Intelligence is a powerful weapon. And in any event, our complex systems also incorporate a great many self-fixes. Most medical interventions simply co-operate with them, often by removing obstacles. The three most successful medical interventions in history have been clean water, better nutrition, and vaccination, and they have been mainly logistical problems for a century and a half.
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