In Re: climate change
I was nursed on the idea that living things adapt through mutation driven diversity and became a fervent acolyte all my life. Temperature and sea levels are on the rise. By current estimates from NOAA and other sources it will take 7 or 8 years for sea level to rise one inch. How will living things adapt?

I finally read Darwin’s Origen as an older adult only about 15 years ago. The most important lesson learned was that Darwin had no idea of genes and genetics, the very basis of evolution, yet formulated his theory anyway. Darwin put forth ideas then available to him. Origen was published in 1859. His simply observed living things, barnacles, domesticated plants and animals, and made notes on the Galapagos. He knew nothing of the actual mechanisms of adaptation yet was the greatest observer of the end result. Thus he was remarkably able to enunciate valid rules. When I was taught biology during the last third of the twentieth century and fell in love with it, it seemed adaptation over generations would occur with glacial slowness, driven by genes. The chemical and structural basis had only been elucidated about a decade before, by Rosalind Franklin (she wasn’t given much credit at the time) Watson and Crick. Change happened through mutation and recombination.

In those heady years as a youngster, I believed every word yet wondered to myself, how can such a slow process of mutation, where one in one thousand or less mutations might induce a adaptive change, possibly drive evolution? That could not be.

Then I read Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean Carroll around 15 years ago and other sources which changed my life. Most of our genome, reproduced at great effort and with good fidelity, is not the Exon portion expressed in protein, but is dark matter “junk” DNA. Only about 4%, in our human case, of DNA makes proteins. The rest seemingly goes unused. Even viral DNA of which there is actually about twice as much as our very own human DNA, is faithfully and laboriously reproduced with each cell division. Why? Viral infections have become part of us, they become us. One quick example. The placenta is made possible in mammals by a gift from a retrovirus whose genes make Syncytin a protein necessary for the placenta’s initial formation. Why do humans pass on through their generations, genes from viruses and many other unused proteins? Only to be able when the need arises, to make the protein the very basis of placenta that defines mammals, gift of a virus or other infections or our own ancestors. And there are abundant switches and other controllers of genetic expression.

In our twenty-first century, geneticists have learned that genes are not mostly passed down vertically through generations, but horizontally in plants, animals, microorganisms, by myriad mechanisms of gene exchange. Mutations do occur but most diversity and adaptation is rapid, by reaching into this enormous toolbox of genetic diversity inside individual cells. The living carry with them not only their own past reproduced in every embryo, but genetic matter from other life forms. What’s more, genes are jumping and moving around all the time, not only by sexual reproduction and recombination.

Now if your genes need not mutate to create diversity, but you already carry in each cell, the very tools and also the switches necessary to turn them on and off, then all of a sudden it becomes possible, should a need arise, to adapt to new environments rapidly, utilizing and co-opting adaptations you carry in your vast genetic tool box. Darwin had no idea of this and we can’t blame him. I, growing up in the latter part of the twentieth century, admirer of Darwin, was not taught this in school. Biologists and scientists publishing in 2021 don’t seem to account for it at all.

Now paleontologists and geologists have handed down, a beautiful but stormy history of our planet. As everyone knows, the only constant is change in the environment. There are two types of change. The first is by revolution. The violent model of revolutionary change was the cretaceous period when the mighty dinosaurs were felled, giving rise to mammals and birds, in a sudden death by meteorite some 66 M years ago. This is likened to the deafeningly rapid “Anthropocene” extinction every bit as bad as a meteorite but caused by death-dealing human activity. If death of living things occurs quickly as with collision by meteorite there is little hope. Yet given the very speed of adaptation that we now know that life generates, there is every hope, the rise of sea levels of inches over centuries and rise in temperatures of 2 or 3 Centigrade degrees over generations, the second form of environmental change, should be slow enough for life to adapt. By that time, counted in a few tens of years, human brains will certainly have devised numerous technologies to decrease the consumption of Carbon based fuels, certainly coal, and to utilize various methods of conservation as well as new nuclear fusion technologies to save us.