The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 2. Star Larvae

Phylogeny, the Arrow of Evolution

Evolution does not follow a program, according to the received view of normal science.

Ever since the first biological cell appeared on Earth, nature has been manufacturing, and occasionally retiring, species. The process is called phylogeny, the evolutionary descent of lineages. It is a process that science dogmatically insists does not proceed according to a program—does not have purpose, is not directed. It is purely contingent, ad hoc.

In the scientific account, evolution is shaped by natural selection, which acts on the variation that occurs among individuals in the local population of a species. Environments "select" for survival those individuals endowed by nature with a "selective advantage," that is, with adaptive traits that enable it to survive and beget fertile, viable offspring.

Individuals selected by the environment to survive and bear progeny skew the genetic profile of generations down the line. As a result, successive generations of a species might bear little resemblance to their ancestors, because they represent only that slice of the original gene pool that possessed the characteristics necessary for survival and reproduction. For generations sufficiently far down the line, the genome of any descendant species is up for grabs. Its makeup will depend on the particular demands made by the environment. And environments themselves change.

No amphibian hatchling can mature into a wolf, but amphibians as a class can sprout a family tree that eventually includes wolves and many other highly unamphibious descendants. The divergences can become so pronounced, that humankind for millennia failed to develop any widely held concept of species descent. However, as the theory of evolution gained currency, hypotheses arose that sought to relate phylogeny and ontogeny in meaningful ways. As different as they are in scale, both can appear to be processes of development.

One influential unification of the two concepts was the "biogenetic law" of German biologist Ernst Haekel in the nineteenth century. Haekel's alliterative law, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," was widely adopted as a scientific principle, its influence reaching well into the twentieth century. Haeckel proposed that a complex organism passes through the stages of its ancestral phylogeny, through the various steps from simple unicellular creature through stages that repeat its evolutionary history.

Does Evolution Anticipate Descendant Species?

The ontogeny of an individual organism appears to be an example of ends being imminent in a natural process—that is, of a natural teleology. But in the scientific view ontogeny is embedded in the larger context of nonteleological, unprogrammed phylogeny. The star larvae hypothesis challenges this view. The hypothesis fundamentally reconceptualizes the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny. It locates phylogeny—biological life’s evolutionary history—within an overarching ontogeny—the stellar life cycle—making the former subordinate to the latter. It inverts the received relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny; it assigns to evolution an ontogenetic plan.

The hypothesis predicts that the genomes of primitive species should contain unexpressed genetic programs ("junk" DNA) that become expressed in newer, more complex species—just as a zygote contains unexpressed programs for the differentiated cell types that make up its adult form and become expressed in the adult—a prediction NOT supported by normal evolution theory. The discovery of such "anticipatory" DNA would challenge the logic of normal evolution theory, because it would suggest that evolution, like ontogeny, relies on anticipatory genetic material.

And in fact this is what ongoing genetic analysis is finding:

A news release (11/24/2005) issued by the journal Trends in Genetics announces that

"Corals and sea anemones (the flowers of the sea), long regarded as merely simple sea-dwelling animals, turn out to be more genetically complex than first realised. They have just as many genes as most mammals, including humans, and many of the genes that were thought to have been "invented" in vertebrates are actually very old and are present in these "simple" animals."

The full text of the release is available at http://www.sars.no/research/technau_Science.pdf

Newer (2007) sequencing and analysis results corroborate the anemone anomalies.

Another example comes from research at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, which found human genes in a marine worm. The news release (11/24/2005) announcing the discovery is at http://www.embl.de/aboutus/communication_outreach/media_relations/2005/051124_heidelberg/index.html

Additional research has found that genes essential for human nerve cells to communicate with one another are present already in bacteria. This research is described in a NIH news release (6/1/2004) at http://www.nichd.nih.gov/new/releases/genes.cfm

These and other phylogenetically anomalous results of genomic analysis are collected at http://www.panspermia.org/oldgenes.htm. This page of Brig Klyce’s "Cosmic Ancestry" web site includes commentary on the relevance of these findings to panspermia. The discovery of advanced genes in primitive organisms suggests that the evolution of life on Earth constitutes an ontogeny—the ontogeny of Gaia, a developmental phase in the stellar life cycle.

If discoveries of evolutionarily anticipatory DNA are not taken as evidence of a evolutionary program, then what justifies assigning a program to ontogeny?

A complex organism begins life as a single cell of a morphologically generic sort. The fertilized egg cells of seahorses, hummingbirds, and humans, for example, are phenotypically indistinguishable. The all look alike. The fertilized egg divides into two cells, then into four, and so on, until enough cells exist for the cellular collective to initiate a specialization of labor. The various types of cells compete and cooperate to acquire the resources that they need to survive, and their collective labors constitute the physiology of the embryo that their bodies, in aggregate, constitute. As the process continues, the distinctive features of the species emerge.

At some point during embryological development, a cell that is only a progenitor of a liver cell gives rise to a true liver cell; a cell that is a progenitor of a neuron gives rise to a neuron, and so on. Embryonic cells give rise to specific morphological types that behave in specific ways in their interlocking niches within the somatic ecology of the organism's physical being. Is this process of diversification teleological or Darwinian?

Consider the counterintuitive argument: Insofar as there is variation among the individuals in the population of any particular cell type in the body of a complex organism, and insofar as not every cell survives to contribute its genetic predispositions to the next generation, there is a natural selection among cells during ontogeny. This thought experiment—fitting ontogenetic cellular differentiation into a model of Darwinian phylogeny—underscores an early and continuing criticism of Darwinian logic, namely that it is tautological. When formulated as "survival of the fittest" the doctrine of natural selection identifies the fittest organisms as those that survive and the survivors as those most fit. Ontogeny can also be seen as a phylogeny, a "cytophylogeny," in which a common ancestral starting point—a fertilized ovum—begets successive generations of increasingly diverse descendant forms.

Imagine the cells of a complex organism, having developed their own theory of evolution, marveling at the blind workings of mutation and natural selection that turned their common ancestor—the original ovum—into the diversity of interdependent cellular species in which they find themselves enmeshed. Fitness selects the survivors, they would say, as demonstrated by their survival! We would understand that these scientifically minded cells have missed the boat, that they live by a developmental program and that they are mistaken when they explain their situation in nonteleological terms. Their thinking, however, would be consistent with modern science's theory of human descent. The star larvae hypothesis argues that human beings have made the same mistake as these cells, in believing that nonteleological processes delivered them from their remote ancestors.

The late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould accounted for the apparent progress of evolutionary change with the metaphor of "the drunkard’s walk." In this thought experiment you must imagine a drunkard staggering along a wall. He ventures varying distances from the wall as he makes his way along it. The distance from the wall at any particular instant is just whatever it is. An increase in average distance over time is merely a function of time passing. The more time that passes, the greater the number of opportunities for the drunk to stumble even farther from the wall than he or she previously had ventured. Increasing distance from the wall corresponds to the increasing complexity, with the wall representing the unicellular limit of biological simplicity. By this metaphor the apparent increase in complexity of organisms over evolutionary time, which suggests a direction to evolution, is better understood as the undirected spread of mere variation. Increases in variation are sufficient to product increases in complexity. Gould lays out this model of pseudoprogress in Full House.

Philosophers Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths, in Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology, summarize Gould's argument:

“Life starts off as simple as life can be. Mostly, it stays that way. Most living things have always been as simple as the first living things, for nearly every organism is a bacterium. Occasionally lineages split and a species appears that is more complex than its parent. No global evolutionary mechanisms make this impossible, but none make it more likely. Complexity increases by passive diffusion from a point of minimum complexity, then wholly undirected, stochastic mechanisms will increase the variance, and that variance must include a bias in the direction of increased complexity. Mechanisms that are blind to complexity suffice to produce an upward drift in average complexity. The fact that there is no bias in the mechanisms of adaptation, speciation, or extinction that favors increased complexity, together with the persistence of bacterial domination of the living world is fatal to any robust version of the idea that evolution over time has generated increased complexity.”

Again, when this line of thinking is applied to ontogeny, the shoe fits. We can ask whether cellular differentiation during the ontogenetic development of an organism the result of wholly undirected, stochastic mechanisms that merely increase variance among cell types. The received view says no; explanations from phylogeny are inadequate to account for ontogeny. But the parallels are stiking: Some cell types, the early undifferentiated types of the blastula, for example, go extinct during human ontogeny. Though, some ancestral types persist, in the form of adult stem cells. And bacteria dominate the environment, comprising 90 percent of the cells in a human body. So why assume an ontogenetic program? Doesn't Gould's model equally well explain the diversification of cells during ontogeny as it does the diversification of species during phylogeny? Empirically, the two processes are of a kind: multiform descent from a common ancestor.

To clarify: The star larvae hypothesis does not argue that ontogeny is a stochastic process that merely increases variance among cell types, but accepts the received view that ontogeny follows an inherent program. But it rejects the received view when it comes to phylogeny, which it argues also follows an inherent program. The applicability of phylogeny's supposed mechanisms to account for ontogeny is meant as a reductio ad absurdum of the received view regarding phylogeny; i.e., if phylogenetic theory has such vast explanatory power, why assume programming anywhere? Cells cooperate and compete in an organism, and organisms cooperate and compete in an ecosystem. If we will not reduce ontogeny to nonteleological processes, then perhaps we can consider that science has erred in reducing phylogeny to nonteleological processes.

The Great Chain of Being Western thinking from Plato through The Elizabethan Age conceived of Creation as structured hierarchically in the form of a "Great Chain of Being." The chain ascended from the smallest germ up through the plants and creatures to humankind and ultimately through the spheres of the firmament to reach the throne of God. The extraterrestrial links in the chain were, within Catholicism, detailed in the form of the Orders of Angels. Few thinkers today would regard such metaphors as more than poetic, a primitive conception of the natural (and supernatural) order. But in the context of the star larvae hypothesis, the Chain of Being presents a more complete picture of evolution than does the standard scientific view. What the Chain lacks, and science provides, is the temporal, dynamic dimension of the process. The Chain of Being represents a longitudinal section through a temporal progression—a developmental sequence that leads from the terrestrial to the extraterrestrial. The Chain was conceived of at a time when Creation was regarded as static, and the Chain provided a cross section of the whole structure. Once we assign the evolution of species to a subordinate position within the overarching ontogeny of the stellar life cycle, we effectively resurrect the Chain of Being, but in an ecological context. Evolution is the metamorphosis of stages in the life cycle of a genus of organism—the stellar organism. The apparent directionlessness of evolution is replaced by a processional sequence that, when viewed in a longitudinal section, takes the form of the Great Chain of Being. The intuition behind the Chain was essentially right, it just failed to take into account the underlying dynamic, temporal process.

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