Chapter 103 17.5 Mastering the tools of evolution

Evolution as a tool is particularly useful for three things: How to reach the field you want to go but can't find the way; How to reach areas you can't imagine; How to break new ground; The third use is the portal to the open world.It is an unsupervised, undirected evolutionary process.It is Holland's ever-expanding Hengxin Machine, a thing that builds itself. False gods like Ray, Sims, and Dawkins, who began their experiments thinking they had delimited the system space, were amazed to see how evolution expanded that space. "That's a lot bigger than I thought" is what they often say.I had a similar feeling of overwhelm when walking between the pictures in the Carl Sims Evolution exhibition.Every new image I found (or the system found for me) was colorful and unexpectedly complex, very different from anything I had ever seen before.Each new image seems to expand the space of possible pictures.I realized that my previous conception of pictures was defined by human beings—or rather, by biological nature.But in Sims' world, there is a fair amount of exciting scenery to be revealed.They are neither man-made nor biologically produced, but they are just as diverse.

Evolution is expanding my perception of possibility.The mechanics of life are very similar to this. The bytes of DNA are functional units—logical evolutionaries that expand the space of possibilities. DNA is equivalent to how Sims and Koza's logic units work. (Perhaps we should say that their logical units are equivalent to DNA?) A handful of logical units can be mixed and paired to form an astronomical number of protein codes.The proteins needed for cell organization, disease, medicine, taste, genetic information and the basic structure of life all come from this small functional alphabet.

Biological evolution is an open evolution that breeds new DNA units from old ones, an ever-expanding, never-ending pool. Molecular breeder Gerald Joyce is happy that he is doing molecular evolution work "as much for fun as it is profitable".But his real dream is to hatch another mechanism for open evolution.He told me, "I want to see if we can start the process of self-organization under our control." Joyce and colleagues are experimenting with the evolution of a simple ribozyme with the ability to make copies of itself -- That was a crucial step that Tom Ray skipped. "Our explicit goal is to start an evolutionary system. We want the molecules to learn how to copy themselves. Then, spontaneous evolution will replace directed evolution."

Spontaneous and self-sustaining evolution is currently a dream for biochemists.No one has so far been able to drive a system to take an "evolutionary step" -- to develop a chemical process that hadn't been done before.Until now, biochemists could only evolve new molecules for problems they already knew how to solve. "Real evolution is about breaking out into a new unknown, not just spinning around with interesting mutations." Joyce said. An efficient, spontaneous, evolving molecular system would be a super powerful tool.It will be an open system that can create any creature. "It will be a colossal achievement in biology," declared Joyce.The impact, he believes, amounts to "finding another life form in the universe that is happy to share this world with us."

But Joyce is a scientist, and he will not be carried away by enthusiasm: "We are not trying to make life and let it develop its own civilization. That is tantamount to nonsense. There are artificial life forms with slightly different chemistry. It’s not a fantasy, but it’s palpable.”