Biology For the Soul is an organized mish-mash of notes and thoughts I’m accumulating with the aim of eventually transforming it all into a book about evolution.

Who am I? I’m George Tyler. I’m a science writer. I’m not a working biologist, but I have enough formal training and experience with biochemistry and cell biology to feel reasonably confident that I know what I’m talking about.

I’m writing a book about evolution because something truly remarkable has been going on in the biological sciences for the last 15 years or so that, for a lot of reasons, hasn’t gotten anywhere near the public attention it deserves.

One of big reasons is that’s complex and esoteric. Some very smart and capable scientists have written about it but their intended audiences seemed mainly to be other scientists and science-oriented people. The subject matter – evolution and genetics – There are lots of reasons haven’t hy am I writing a book about evolution? If you’re not a biologist but you’re someone who’s interested in science or the environment or technology, then you probably have an outdated and, apologies, defective understanding of what genes do and how evolution works.and I’m researching a book about the remarkable new picture of evolution that’s emerging in the 21st century. Writing about new ideas helps me understand them, so this blog is basically a fancy online version of my thoughts and notes to myself as I organize the information for the book and try out different ways of presenting the material. I’m also including reviews of some of the better books I’m encountering along the way.

Before I go any further, I’ll mention that I live in the beautiful state of Vermont, which allows me to now break up the text with some lovely pictures from the Green Mountains.

What Am I Up To?

Why do I want to write a book about evolution?  If you’re not a biologist but you’re someone who’s interested in science or the environment or technology, then you probably have an outdated and, apologies, defective understanding of what genes do and how evolution works.

It’s not your fault. The old 20^th century paradigms about genes and evolution are so deeply baked into our education system and culture that unless you’ve studied biological sciences as an undergraduate within the last fifteen years or so, you’re probably not aware of what’s going on.

I just read a book by a physicist at a prominent university (no need to mention names here) who explained how quantum mechanics is reflected throughout nature. It was interesting but also ultimately useless because his understanding of how evolution worked was childish. Straight out of the 1970s or 80s, which was probably when he went to college.

So, what’s the new understanding of evolution that’s coming into view? For one thing, it’s now clear that the environment we grow up in, and the environments our parents grew up in, play a major role in our biological development.

This may not seem particularly shocking. We all know that life circumstances can affect a child’s development. But the new biology is saying that the environment can actually alter genomes. It’s a very old idea, first expressed by Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (just Lamarck is fine), a French naturalist and philosopher who predated Darwin by 40 years. From his early 19th century perspective, Lamarck knew nothing about genes or inheritance, but he observed that all living organisms appeared to evolve from other organisms. And he speculated that this evolutionary change happened as organisms adapted to new environments and passed their adaptations directly to their young.

Fifty years later, Darwin came up with the same idea about species evolving from other species, but he theorized that this happened because of random mutations that occurred when organisms reproduced. If the mutations proved beneficial then they gradually became amplified throughout the entire population of whatever plant or animal they occurred in. And thus, a new species was born.

There was no knowledge of cell biology, biochemistry, or genetics at that point. Darwin and Lamarck based their theories entirely on empirical observations. They both correctly saw “nature” as the decisive force behind evolutionary change, but for lots of reasonable and unreasonable reasons, Darwin’s theory prevailed. Although “prevailing” doesn’t tell the whole story. Twentieth century biologists took things a step further and actively discredited Lamarck’s theory, to the extent that for an early modern biologist’s work to be called “Lamarckian” was a cold slap in the face and cause for academic expulsion.

Now, 200 years later, Lamarck was at least as right as Darwin, and perhaps quite a bit more right. There’s an interesting story about all this that I may get into, but I’ll wrap up the history lesson for now by noting that Lamarck was contemporary with Mary Shelley, who wrote “Frankenstein.” What a fascinating glimpse into the consciousness of early nineteenth century European intelligentsia.

How was Lamarck more right than Darwin?

It turns out that genes play a much smaller role in how we develop or what we develop into than we once thought. Depending on what trait we’re talking about, they might play only a minor role. As one writer put it, genes are like stage cues at an improv show.* There’s no such thing as a “gene” for height, weight, intelligence, etc. etc. Our biological bodies and behavioral capacities are determined by suites of genes that get turned on and off by environmental cues interacting with the genetic engineering machinery in our cells. The machinery may also move genes around, modify them, or cap them and make them unusable.

What’s the “genetic engineering machinery?”  It’s all the RNA molecules and networks of proteins integrated with them that regulate the cell. To do all the things a cell must do, its “machinery” uses the genome as a kind of reference tool for making proteins. It’s the cellular machinery, not the genome, that’s the genius at the wheel here.  

Which leads to the other big part of the story: intelligence.

One of the deepest fakes about artificial intelligence is that actually just mimics only a narrow band of human intelligence. It’s useless for most of the intellectual activities we routinely engage in. Machines don’t continuously navigate the human social environment; they aren’t inspired by works of art or made happy by a baby’s smile or blissful by a walk on a warm summer night beneath twinkling galaxies – all of which are mental activities that reflect deep intelligence.

Artificial “intelligence” is really just about problem solving, which is just one of the many things our biologically evolved intelligence was designed to do.

But if we’re willing to accept that machines can be intelligent in a way that’s different from us, then we should have no problem seeing the emergent intelligence in a cell’s capacity to regulate its genome to produce the proteins it needs to respond to environmental influences.  Scientists warn us not to attribute human characteristics to natural phenomena. But we should be equally averse to denying sentience and agency to other living systems simply because they don’t operate like a human brain.  

Isn’t that the mantra we’re hearing from technologists? If a complex, dynamic, evolving, problem-solving, electro-chemical matrix made of metal can be “intelligent,” then why not a matrix that’s far more complex and able to respond to a much wider variety of stimuli and made of organic molecules?

Another piece of the story is that intelligence “emerges” this way throughout higher levels of biological organization, from the level of the cell to the level of the tissue or organ to the level (obviously) of the entire organism. Each level is interconnected with the others and there’s no particular level that’s in charge.

Some real-world examples of how this works?  Plants can grow larger or smaller leaves to adapt to varying levels of sunlight. Fungi can flexibly produce the complex chemicals they need to break down novel organic substances or zombify insects into spreading their spore. Both are examples of organisms holistically using the molecular engineering machinery in billions of their cells to respond, as entire organisms, to the environment.

Intelligence emerges first from the biochemical-molecular biological matrix in the cytoplasm of every cell, and it emerges at every higher level of biological organization. This is not new age mystical musing (although there’s nothing wrong with that). This is the new understanding of how biology operates based on decades of data.

Nature is inherently intelligent. We’re not talking about anti-Darwinian arguments like intelligent design or creationism (although those are interesting arguments to have). But when we think of the totality of all the decision-making sentience at every level in every environment, it defies comprehension.

Or, at least, it defies my comprehension, which is why I’ve chosen to write a book about it.

Why “Biology for the Soul?”

I’ve called the blog “Biology for the Soul” because we live in existentially troubling times and, to me, of all the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, one of the most spiritually soothing things we can know – from a scientific perspective anyway – is that our existence, however brief, was meant to be (I’ll explain in a future blog post) and that the ethereal, biophysical world that brought us forth and resonates within us will continue producing magical beings like us long after we’re gone.

The old theory of evolution squeezed the meaning out of biological existence by reducing it to “selfish genes” and algorithmic mechanistic logic. The newly emerging picture of evolution tells us that we’re immersed in an interconnected sentient world that we’ve only begun to understand. Imagine an old Star Trek episode where they land on a planet that’s a lot like earth, but every plant and animal is intelligent. That’s where we’ve landed – or I should say, that’s where we’ve always been; we just didn’t realize it until now. Whether you’re a cynical atheist or a believer in biblical creation, I think there’s a deeply spiritual message here if you open your mind to it. It won’t tarnish your atheism; God won’t get mad.

Who Am I? (boring, but if you really need to know)

I think the spark for my interest in evolution occurred in my Catholic high school biology class when the teacher – an intense Irish Jesuit – explained the theory of evolution.

It’s far too distant to remember specific details, but I recall head-spinning fascination with the idea that all forms of life, including humans, had evolved from previously existing forms of life. Other than magical religious stories I’d been told as a kid, I hadn’t really thought about how the world came to be. Evolution delivered a sudden jolt of intuitive correctness.

But I also remember that we didn’t get into anything philosophical about it. Everyone, including the instructor, just seemed to take this amazing piece of information in stride, and at that point in my high school career I wasn’t going to stand up and be a science nerd and provoke some thoughtful discussion.

If you’re a Catholic, it probably doesn’t surprise you that a Jesuit instructor made no effort to insert God and religion into the lesson plan about evolution.

For non-Catholics, I’ll first explain that Jesuits are an order of Roman Catholic priests who tend to be academically inclined and politically progressive. Sometimes it gets them into trouble. Daniel Berrigan, a famous anti-war activist in the 1960s and 70s who made it onto the FBI’s ‘most wanted’ list, was a Jesuit.    

I’ll also explain that contrary to pop culture mythology, the Catholic Church is very comfortable with science. The Vatican accepted evolution as “correct science” back in the 1960s. One of the 20^th century’s great mystics and visionaries about the spiritual meaning of human evolution was anthropologist and Jesuit scholar, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The current Pope Leo (Augustinian) has embraced the cause of the late Pope Francis (Jesuit) who pronounced that humanity has a sacred duty to protect the earth because, after all, it’s God’s creation. Francis also said that Catholics in particular, because we know better, had a special responsibility to care for the poor and marginalized who’ve been impacted by climate change.

The Vatican also has an official astronomer which, I’m guessing, is a precautionary holdover from the Middle Ages after all that unpleasant Galileo business. Don’t want to make that mistake again, eh? The current astronomer, Richard Anthony D’Souza, holds a doctorate from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and has published widely about the phenomenon of merging galaxies. And also – you guessed it – he’s a Jesuit.   

I only mentioned all of this Catholic stuff because I think my upbringing helps explain why I’m still looking for some deep underlying meaning in evolution.

But enough of that.

At college I majored in biology, which back then meant taking mostly chemistry, physics and math courses, due to the prevailing philosophical belief that biology was reducible to physical principles.

I certainly believed everything was reducible to physics … until I took a vertebrate anatomy and evolution course with an internationally recognized paleontologist, Dr. Richard Estes. Enlightened by his wonderful lectures plus having spent many hours in the lab examining fossils and dissecting cats, rats, birds, fish, salamanders, snakes, and sharks, plus many hours engrossed in books and papers about evolution – amidst of all that – I remember one evening reading George Gaylord Simpson’s The Meaning of Evolution and suddenly having an epiphany that evolution – life –  was its own separate wondrous and infinitely complex universe. It was entangled with the physical universe, for sure, but it was most definitely not “reducible” to anything but itself.

Let me quickly say that this was not some uniquely brilliant insight I was having. It was just one of those things that happens when you study something so intensely that it actually changes your brain.  Many others have had the same realization. Nevertheless, it was exhilarating because it clicked into place all at once: From the time, three-and-a-half-billion years ago, when the first replicating cells came to life, the entire dynamic continuum of evolution was, is, like an endless three-dimensional kaleidoscopic stream of exquisite and intricate living beings, on and on, driven by the sun’s energy.

But it also, to me, seemed to possess an inherent sense of itself and a directional purpose. This was something that I later discovered many biologists also believed, but they kept their mouths shut because there was no evidence to support such an idea and it contradicted the party line that evolution, though fascinating and prolific, was ultimately directionless, meaningless, and pointless.  

Yet, what had I seen? Dissect a salamander and then dissect a cat; it’s like comparing a Model T Ford to a Maserati. Compare a fish brain to a lizard brain to a monkey brain; it’s like comparing an old-fashioned calculator to a desktop PC and then to an AI supercomputer.  I had studied genetics by that point. I understood quite well the basic principles of population genetics, adaptation, genetic drift, etc. The prevailing theoretical framework of ‘natural selection’ – the biologist’s dogma – said that: (1) New life forms arise as a result of accidental mutations in genomes that confer adaptive advantages. Competition sorts out which mutations get to live or die. (2) The apparent trend towards greater complexity can mislead you into thinking it’s an inherent trend of evolution. It’s not.  Organisms are only as complex as they need to be to adapt to their environments.

Yet, the trend towards greater complexity seemed far too obvious and focused to dismiss.  Mammals and birds were more sophisticated, flexible, and adaptable to environmental challenges than reptiles and amphibians; they had bigger brains and more sophisticated metabolisms, as if nature was trying to achieve something.

But what did I know, right?

At that point in my life, pursuing an academic career in some esoteric subject like biological philosophy seemed way too self-indulgent and irresponsible. I liked doing lab work and loved sophisticated biotechnology, so after college and graduate school, I spent years working in well-equipped labs doing basic biomedical research. I learned how to isolate biologically active proteins from living cells. I learned how to trace neuronal tracts. I learned how to maintain a line of cancer cells that had originally been isolated from an osteosarcoma in a little girl who’d tragically died years before, but who’s lingering and widely preserved and replicated remnant helped reveal vital information that most certainly saved other children’s lives. I loved being around brilliant scientists who were much smarter than me, and the heady atmosphere of feeling you’re doing something useful on the cutting edge of science. I coauthored research manuscripts that were published in scientific journals. I thrived on all that, and there are thousands of people in research labs all over the globe who know what I’m talking about.

But there was a dark side. I eventually grew to hate the animal research we were required to do in our field of biochemistry. I had done it for years, existing in that weird bubble of denial that many researchers exist in, but I’d finally reached a point where I couldn’t stomach it anymore. Nor did I wish to transfer to another lab (I was at a pharmaceutical company) that did only in vitro (non-animal) research, because this was really just another form of denial. I still had (and have) great respect for people in medical research, but I’d gotten too far away from what had interested me in biology in the first place.

But one thing that I’d really become fascinated with was writing. Slaving over a juicy research manuscript mesmerized me, which is incredibly weird, I know, but there it is. I loved the creative process of putting words together, even within the excruciatingly tight space you get in a research journal. I wanted to see what it was like to write in ways where you had more space. So, I started a new career trying to do science writing when I could but taking on any writing gig that helped pay bills.Which is how, years later, I find myself putting together a book about the new paradigm of evolution.

Buffing up my knowledge of molecular biology is challenging. I acquired a bit of familiarity with it in graduate school, but so much has changed and so very, very much more has been learned. So, I’m still sorting my way through it. But trying to make it reader-friendly, even for readers who are science or tech savvy, is a bigger challenge. And thus, the purpose of the blog. I’m trying to fine tune the voice and pacing of the narrative and play with some ideas.

So, there it is. That’s what Biology for the Soul is about. If you’ve stuck with me so far, thank you! I’d love to hear from you.

Some Books About the New Evolution

While there are many good books about the new paradigm of inheritance and evolution, one of the most comprehensive is: Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, revised edition, 2014, MIT press.

For a livelier, more succinct description: Dance to the Tune of Life by Denis Noble, 2017, Cambridge University Press.

For a convincingly argued case for why biology is not reducible to math and physics: A World Beyond Physics – The Emergence and Evolution of Life by Stuart A. Kauffman, 2019, Oxford University Press.

*Zoe Schlanger, The Light Eaters, Harper Collins, 2024, (e-book loc. 3,501.