Survival of the friendliest?

NSF Study on Green Algae Finds Darwin Was Wrong About Competition

It raises an eyebrow, to say the least, to find a mainstream science story so offhandedly dissing Darwin, especially when the National Science Foundation is paying for it. That's what happened when the NSF's "Discoveries" website listed this: "Study suggests survival isn't always about competition." Yes, the NSF supported work that undermines a key Darwinian concept: competition among closely related species.

With $2 million in funding over a five-year period starting in 2010, researchers from the University of Michigan, led by Bradley Cardinale, with help from colleagues at the University of Maryland and UC Santa Barbara, set out to test a fundamental aspect of Darwin's theory. According to Darwin, closely related species compete more than distant ones, because they occupy similar ecological niches. The scientists neither intended nor expected to find Darwin's precept wrong. Examining closely related algae in North American lakes, they expected to find species battling each other for dominance. What they found was "completely unexpected," the report says. Look at the shock these scientists experienced:

The researchers ... were so uncomfortable with their results that they spent the next several months trying to disprove their own work. But the research held up.

"[Darwin's] hypothesis is so intuitive that it was hard for us to give it up. But we are becoming more and more convinced that he wasn't right about the organisms we've been studying," Cardinale says. "It doesn't mean the hypothesis won't hold for other organisms, but it's enough that we want to get biologists to rethink the generality of Darwin's hypothesis." (Emphasis added.)

So it's not about competition. It's about cooperation.

"If Darwin had been right, the older, more genetically unique species should have unique niches, and should compete less strongly, while the ones closely related should be ecologically similar and compete much more strongly -- but that's not what happened," Cardinale says. "We didn't see any evidence of that at all." They found this to be so in field experiments, lab experiments and surveys in 1,200 lakes in North America.

"If Darwin was right, we should've seen species that are genetically different and ecologically unique, doing unique things and not competing with other species," he adds. "But we didn't."

This result is important because competition is a key tenet of Darwinism. It harks back to the ideas of Thomas Malthus, who assumed that organisms, multiplying exponentially, cannot keep up with the food supply that only grows arithmetically. The inevitable consequence, Malthus reasoned, would be widespread death except for those individuals who could successfully compete for limited resources. Darwin depended on this notion when he built his theory of natural selection. In the sixth edition of On the Origin of Species, he used "survival of the fittest," a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer (another follower of Malthus), as a more accurate representation of his ideas, because it avoided the appearance of design (i.e., nature "selecting" something, as if on purpose).

Darwin "was obsessed with competition," Cardinale says. "He assumed the whole world was composed of species competing with each other, but we found that one-third of the species of algae we studied actually like each other. They don't grow as well unless you put them with another species. It may be that nature has a heck of a lot more mutualisms than we ever expected.

"Maybe species are co-evolving," he adds. "Maybe they are evolving together so they are more productive as a team than they are individually. We found that more than one-third of the time, that they like to be together. Maybe Darwin's presumption that the world may be dominated by competition is wrong."

Cardinale is being tentative with his "maybes" because it's a big deal to contradict the man most scientists view as the greatest biologist who ever lived, whose views are central to debates over design and loom large in battles over school science. But the evidence has spoken. If it proves true with other organisms, it's hard to overestimate the impact of this finding. The work was done by scientists supportive of Darwinism. This is huge! What will our Darwin-lobbying friends at the National Censor for Science Education do now? Oh, just ignore it, of course.

The scientists did not set out to disprove Darwin, but, in fact, to learn more about the genetic and ecological uniqueness of fresh-water green algae so they could provide conservationists with useful data for decision-making. "We went into it assuming Darwin to be right, and expecting to come up with some real numbers for conservationists," Cardinale says. "When we started coming up with numbers that showed he wasn't right, we were completely baffled."

The finding has political consequences as well. The EPA and non-governmental environmentalist organizations tend to focus on saving more distant species, thinking similar ones are redundant.

But if scientists ultimately prove Darwin wrong on a larger scale, "then we need to stop using his hypothesis as a basis for conservation decisions," Cardinale says. "We risk conserving things that are the least important, and losing things that are the most important. This does bring up the question: How do we prioritize?"

Like pulling on a sweater string, this finding threatens to unravel other parts of Darwin's theory. Consider the implications for his famous "Tree of Life" diagram:

Certain traits determine whether a species is a successful competitor or a poor competitor, he says. "Evolution does not appear to predict which species have good traits and bad traits," he says. "We should be able to look at the Tree of Life, and evolution should make it clear who will win in competition and who will lose. But the traits that regulate competition can't be predicted from the Tree of Life."

Cardinale tried to do some damage control by proposing co-evolution and cooperative evolution, but a little reflection shows that such ideas are fundamentally opposed to traditional Darwinism. Cooperation is the opposite of competition. Think of all the political baggage that stemmed from Darwin's doctrine of survival of the fittest. What if all the Social Darwinist regimes had been taught that the way to succeed is to cooperate? The mind boggles at the thought.

To be accurate, the finding allows that competition may work in some cases and not others. Algae may interact differently than mammals or dinosaurs. However this shakes out with further studies, one thing is clear: empirical observations show Darwin was wrong in a case designed to test his theory, and we didn't have to say it. Scientists with every desire to prove Darwin right found out with their own eyes. Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of the evidence.

Alas,no help from the hobbits.

The Little Lady of Flores Spoke from the Grave. But Said What, Exactly?

 

If Darwinian evolution is true, the human race should evolve into different species. Indeed, Darwin said that in Descent of Man. It is a feature, not a bug. But there is no clear evidence that it is happening. Thus, it would be most helpful to the argument if a new species (i.e., clearly human but not homo sapiens) was unearthed. Or at least, if the evidence was mixed, a species that could be argued into existence.

In 2003, an international archeology team was excavating the Liang Bua limestone cave (pictured above) on the Indonesian island of Flores, between Sumatra and East Timor. At a six meters depth, they unearthed the skeleton of a tiny ancient woman, about thirty years old. She was a meter in height (a little over a yard), with the brain capacity of a small chimpanzee.

When the discovery was announced in October 2004, the buzz was that she represented a new human species. As such, she was "extreme," "spectacular," "startling," and "incredible." The Return of the King was released that year, so she was dubbed the "hobbit."

One researcher hoped that a "male" would turn up. His wish was swiftly granted -- by a National Geographic artist who offered an imaginative drawing of a "male" returning from the hunt, looking impressively feral, and distinctly other than human. By August 2007, Science was calling the dig "hallowed ground." In that year, modern humans were predictably fingered as the villains that wiped out Flores man. In addition, the find answered another unmet need: To Henry Gee, writing in Nature, it posed "thorny questions about the uniqueness of Homo sapiens."

The cave turned up more than bones; it revealed stone tools, remains of fires, and the bones of pygmy elephants and other feasts. So the hobbit woman and the other individuals later unearthed -- the oldest dating from perhaps 94,000 years ago -- apparently followed the same lifestyle as other ancient human groups. But then how did we decide that they were not just one of the vast variety of human types?

The key fossil's small brain was taken by many researchers as evidence that the Floresians must be a separate species. That and an odd-shaped wrist bone. But almost immediately, a competing narrative appeared. In November, leading Indonesian scientist Teuku Jacob (1929-2007) announced that the Flores hobbit was an "ordinary human" and "just like us," but possibly with mental defects. Jacob took the bones to his own lab, and returned most of them the following February, amid charges that he had severely damaged them.

He also damaged the orthodox narrative. And Nature wasn't having any of that "just like us" stuff. In March 2005, it triumphantly reported the results of a computer simulation that bolstered the new species claim, in a story titled "Critics silenced by scans of hobbit skull." But the critics' silence did not dispel lingering doubt about "Homo floresiensis."

Concern was raised that the ongoing controversy might be good for creationism. One researcher offered that "we certainly make it easy for them when we have disagreements like this one. I think that a lot of what has been said is going to have to be retracted. Given the amount of media attention, it just makes the field look incompetent." He concluded: "Nobody is on the side of the angels now."

Not even the angels, it seemed.

By March 2008, the scene had changed again. New Scientist told us, "Researchers have uncovered bones that could drive another nail into the Homo floresiensis coffin." The magazine's nail-and-coffin metaphor is a signal: Doubt is now fashionable, not forbidden. Why? Apparently, diminutive humans had "overrun" a nearby island as recently as 1400 years ago -- "but despite their size these people clearly belonged to our species."

Meanwhile, more recent reconstructions have suggested that Flores man looked like us, and that earlier artists' reconstructions may have distorted this fact:

Basically, chimps don't have human cheeks, the study argues, so past reconstructions of the hobbit's face botched its likely looks. Or past efforts fell into the trap of assuming all early modern human species resembled "wild men," "missing links" or "ape-men."

And on it goes. The old bones told no new tale.

To get a sense of the breadth of positions in the controversy, see "Is the Hobbit's Brain Unfeasibly Small?" (maybe not); "Compelling Evidence Demonstrates that 'Hobbit' Fossil Does Not Represent A New Species of Hominid"; "Researchers offer alternate theory for found skull's asymmetry" (malformed individual); "'Hobbit' Was an Iodine-Deficient Human, Not Another Species, New Study Suggests."

Meanwhile, the Neanderthals were becoming ever more dissatisfied with their treatment at the hands of taxonomists.