The Independent reports some research from the “1000 Genome Project”, under the headline “Human genome study reveals certain genes are less essential than previously thought”. The gist is that in 2,500 individual genomes studied (a supererogatory number in terms of the project’s name):
“…we were surprised to see over 200 genes that are missing entirely in some people,” said Jan Korbel of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, who led one of the genome project’s studies.
The article goes on:
The finding has astonished researchers because it was thought that all the 20,000 or so genes that make up the human genome must be essential for life. However, it may be that some genes are dispensable because of some kind of built-in redundancy to the human genome.
How accurate it is that it was believed that all 20K genes are absolutely indispensible I’m not sure. But what is certain is that the total of coding genes found in the Human Genome Project was already surprisingly niggardly in accounting for our species, especially given the allegedly minor differences from the chimp genome. This doesn’t appear to leave much room for unnecessary genes gathering dust. To put it in perspective, 200 genes is 1% of the total – the same as some of the less conservative estimates of the difference between the human and the chimp genomes.
But surprising numbers aren’t the main issue here – what ought (at least) to put the cat among the pigeons is that one word “redundancy”. It means, in general usage, “superfluity” or even “supererogation”(!), and in the context of entities having functions it is deeply teleological. For redundancy must always be considered with respect to some goal above and beyond the mechanism in question, and evolution doesn’t, it is said, do goals.
All cars, for example, have since early days been required to have two separate braking systems (classically a hydraulic footbrake and a mechanical handbrake). This is because being able to stop was considered so important that redundancy was built in: the goal of stopping was essential to the function of the whole car. Or, more accurately, since a car has no overall goals, being just a collection of parts, we should say that stopping was essential to the aims of the designer who gave it purpose. The existence of both a belt and braces is strong evidence of an important teleological target.
A different example might be the different voicings of chords on a guitar. Completely different hand positions can be used for musically equivalent chords, and I find that, particularly on pieces I don’t know well enough to play automatically, I often use different voicings at the same points of the tune. And that’s because the hand positions are not following their own inbuilt agenda of efficient causation, but the needs of the human target of rendering that particular tune, whatever it takes.
A third common example could be one’s intention to travel to work. Finding the trains cancelled by a strike, you take the car. Finding an accident blocking the main road, you divert down a side street. Or you walk. If your journey were only a train of efficient causes, breaking the sequence ought to stop it. The use of alternatives reveals final causation – a goal. One could plausibly account for the existence of a car, or a tune, or a journey, via efficient causes. But the existence of alternative efficient causes with the same end, within the same system, implies final causation, and an entity capable of aiming at it.
This is particularly applicable in evolution, when it is said to operate entirely by efficient causes, ateleologically. Evolution by natural selection is notoriously short term: if a variation is selected by the environment to reproduce successfully, it continues to exist. If there is even one costly step to be traversed towards some functional fitness, purifying selection screens it out.
In the “selfish gene” concept, the entity rather dubiously analogised as the unit “aiming” to survive is the individual gene. Together with the other genes with which it chances to be thrown together, with no global organising principle, it generates a survival machine called “an organism” to ensure its own propagation. Now quite clearly the findings of the new research make this particular gene-centred view very far-fetched indeed. In many cases, it seems, the selfish gene doesn’t turn up for the game, yet a perfectly good substitute is already in place, or is co-opted from elswehere in the team. This makes it far more likely that the organism is using the genes, rather than the genes using the organism.
It will always be possible, of course, to generate an epicycle to keep the selfish gene concept on the table – perhaps the “back-up” gene always contributes to the function, but at a lower level. Perhaps it serves some other function but absence of the main gene happens to leave a job-opportunity it can fill. Perhaps they are in competition with each other, the second to evolve having pushed the first aside. Anything’s possible – but in these cases the word “redundancy” ought to have been avoided, for there was actually nothing “superfluous” involved. Redundancy was instead thrown off as an accidental by-product – yet apparently as a matter of course, given its frequency. The blind watchmaker whose mistakes always performs useful functions is a possibility. But is he in the least plausible?
On the contrary usually natural selection is understood to do just enough to get by, and there is no reason for it to expend effort and energy developing multiple routes to the same function, especially if (as seems probable in at least many cases) they are only used when, occasionally, the main system is absent. Unlike human research projects, evolution by natural selection has no means of deciding to do something 2,500 times where 1,000 would do: “just to make sure” is teleological and requires some other theory of evolution.
There’s also another important direction these findings force us to take. If the organism governs the genes rather than vice versa, then what is this organism? Clearly it must be more than just the sum of the genes.
When the study uses the word “redundancy” for the missing genes, it is used within the implied reference frame of “human form”. Bits of the human genome are missing, but the individuals still do the “human thing”. It is real people who lack these genes, rather than specimens that are near-human.
If the human appetite-engendering gene Munchmuch is absent in jellyfish, and its function is served by the alternative munchMuch, it’s not surprising because jellyfish are not people. But if we find munchMuch instead of Munchmuch in a small tribe in New Guinea, does that make the tribe less human (or a human-jellyfish hybrid, perhaps)? Of course not. They are simply evidence that the “human genome” does not define “human”.
If the human genome is not a standard, but a spectrum in which all the variations are duly noted, perhaps explained, and filed away, then there is something other than “genome” that defines us as human. We might call it “form” or “formal causation” – but it requires to be explained by something other than the sum total of our genes, for that has been shown to be pretty plastic.
Whatever this “form” is, it continues to do what it takes to maintain human functions when the genes that were formerly alleged to define those functions aren’t even present. There is therefore a “normal” humanity which is more than the genes, because at least 200 of them (and quite probably more, if larger samples were used) are redundant, meaning that “normal” function (ie that tending towards the end of humanness) is maintained without them.
All this is implied in that term “genetic redundancy”. Lack of redundancy, in the case of any particular gene, does not imply that there is no such thing as form, but only that normal form cannot be maintained when the gene is lost, just as the loss of our brain or heart ends human life. But the presence of any redundancy – even in 1% of genes – is evidence for form, teleology, and some kind of global organisation. And global organisation is the antithesis of Darwinian evolution.
That’s why this research seems to me pretty important.