don't know much of biology

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

probably not much of anything. Anyway, a local biologist
friend of mine whom I consider hep to both biology and
literature forwarded me the below essay this morning.

Now this writer does seem to me - clutching to the dichotomy
"bad entropy-good antientropy" which he sees ironclad - one
clumsy and simplifying reader of TRP. Anyway, TRP's novels
have apparently acted as a fruitful catalyst for him:

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Current Biology, Vol 9 No 14 (1999), pp. R500-R501

The counterforce
Gerald F. Joyce

In his novel V., Thomas Pynchon paints a picture of the twentieth century
dominated by physics, and of human behavior swept along by the inescapable
tide of physical laws [1]. What chance does an individual have in seeking
order in his or her own world when the universe as a whole is streaming
inevitably towards a state of maximum entropy? It is a distressing
picture, made more chilling by Pynchon's observation that rather than
resist the universal tendency toward disorder, humans have become highly
adept at promoting it.

Pynchon again takes up the theme of the inexorable tendency toward maximum
entropy in his later novel Gravity's Rainbow [2], this time drawing on the
metaphor of the German V2 rockets raining down upon London towards the end
of World War II. Despite the best efforts of British military intelligence
to predict where the rockets will land, it seems that they are following a
perfect Poissonal distribution. Once the rocket's engine cuts out over the
North Sea, it is only gravity's rainbow that determines where it will
fall. Destruction is not only inevitable, it is random and dispassionate.

And yet, as Pynchon continues in the last section of Gravity's Rainbow ,
there is a "counterforce", an organizing principle that runs counter to
the tendency towards maximum entropy, at least in some instances. His
metaphor for the organizing force is the period immediately after the fall
of Nazi Germany, when competing interests - national, commercial, and
individual - scurried about to carve order out of the rubble. Pynchon
ascribes almost mythical character to the counterforce, which he also
refers to as the "green uprising" or the "Titans of the Earth." He
suggests that there is a general principle, as fundamental as the second
law of thermodynamics, but running in the opposite direction, that allows
daisies to grow out of the ashes.

As a student of molecular genetics at the University of Chicago in the
mid-1970s, I read Pynchon and ruminated on the doomsday message of V.
Walking past Henry Moore's sculpture Atomic Energy, which marks the spot
of the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction, it was impossible not
to appreciate how physics reveals the pathway toward randomness and
destruction. But what about the counterforce? Can we achieve a scientific
understanding of the organizing principle that, at least temporarily,
stands in the face of physical law?

The green uprising is abundantly manifest on Earth in the origin and
diversification of life. Erwin Schrödinger, in his 1944 monograph What is
Life? [3], argued that order within living systems arises at the expense
of the conversion of high-energy starting materials to low-energy
products. Ilya Prigogine refined this concept, pointing out that living
systems are open systems not at equilibrium. The second law of
thermodynamics applies when one considers both the living system and its
environment, with order increasing within the system at the expense of
decay in the environment.

For biologists, the counterforce is Darwinian evolution based on natural
selection. Driven by the metabolic flux of foodstuffs to waste products,
living systems accumulate order in the form of genetic information. In the
early 1950s, three scientific advances set the stage for harnessing the
biological counterforce, just as advances in physics at the beginning of
the century set the stage for harnessing the power of the atom.

First was the discovery by Watson and Crick of the structure of the DNA
double helix, revealing the chemical basis for molecular information
storage. Second was the experiment of Miller and Urey demonstrating that
the chemical building blocks of life, such as amino acids, can be
synthesized from simple starting materials in a simulated prebiotic
environment. Third was the work of John von Neuman describing a universal
self-reproducing automaton, a machine analogue of a living system.

Inspired by Pynchon's writings, I decided that I wanted to be a
`counterforce engineer', and I carried this aim through graduate school
and postdoc training. From a molecular biologist's point of view my task
was clear: starting from simple chemical building blocks, construct a
self-reproducing system that, like DNA-based life on Earth, would be
capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.

Needless to say, this task has not been met. But, as Sol Spiegelman showed
in the late 1960s [4], it is possible to cause nucleic acid molecules to
evolve in the test tube. With the discovery of catalytic RNA, and advances
in nucleic acid amplification techniques such as the polymerase chain
reaction, it became possible to construct laboratory systems that allow
the Darwinian evolution of functional RNA (and later DNA) molecules. This
is not evolution based on natural selection, but rather directed evolution
based on selection constraints imposed by the experimenter. We've been
playing these in vitro evolution games in my own laboratory for the past
10 years.

The counterforce, it turns out, is not much to look at - typically, 20
microliters of a clear, colorless solution. But in those solutions the
Titans are rumbling. We can begin in the lab on a Monday with a population
of 10 14 random-sequence nucleic acid molecules and by Friday witness the
emergence of order in the form of macromolecules of a particular sequence
that perform a specific catalytic task. Over the week, the evolving system
has expended more than 10 17 energy-rich nucleoside triphosphates, but has
created an island of order in a universe that is forever tumbling toward a
state of maximum entropy.

References
1. Pynchon T: V. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott; 1963.
2. Pynchon T: Gravity's Rainbow. New York: Viking Press; 1973.
3. Schrödinger E: What is Life? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
1944.
4. Mills DR, Peterson RL, Spiegelman S: An extracellular Darwinian
experiment with a self-duplicating nucleic acid molecule. Proc Natl Acad
Sci USA 1967, 58:217-224.
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In connection with the essay it reads:

"The editors of Current Biology have invited a number of biologists
to reveal the work that has influenced them most profoundly in their
careers. These brief essays are published in the Turning Points series."


Heikki