Darwin, DNA, the dodo and the digital depot

Sander Kooreman wrote a blog called Darwin, DNA, the dodo and the digital depot. In this article he lent some examples from evolutionary biology to make his points. This is the first in a series of examples I will blog about to show biology misconceptions.

I will take the liberty to translate some parts of his interesting Dutch-language story on digital storage and retrieval, a subject that has my personal interest by the way. It is not that I dislike his argument nor his subject, his is just one example of the general misunderstandings of how biology and, here, evolution works. I follow three of his five chapters.

Darwin
Darwin is quoted as saying or suggesting: what survives is best in adaptation. Well, not really. This suggests that better adaptation leads to survival. But what is better here? And what is adapted? The species that survives?

The quote could be what survives is what we call adapted. Not even 'better' but just adapted. Of two competing species only one survives in a defined ecology niche. The other species goes extinct or moves out or changes its niche. The one with the most breeding survival will often outcompete the other, if not the climate changes, or a storm kills the population, or a volcano, or gas from a well under a lake or... in which case the "less adapted" will survive in the end, just because it was less adapted and therefore more flexible. Or is this better adapted? A self-fulfilling prophesy.

DNA
On information storage Mr. Kooreman writes "A location where since the beginning of Creation all information is stored with the purpose of transmitting that is our DNA". I am quite sure Mr. Kooreman is using 'Creation' only as  a metaphor, but even then it is highly improbable that DNA has been there from the beginning. More important is the realisation that DNA is highly evolved: it was created as a result of evolution.

The second conflict is in the word 'purpose'. Purpose is connected to teleology, the science or philosophy of finality, purposefulness, in Nature. Biology holds that here is no teleologic basis in evolution. There is the opposite: causality. DNA evolved because it was better in storing and retrieving instructions on building blocks than previous biological technologies like RNA and outcompeted these for the most part. Evolution has a cause but no purpose. And that seems very hard to swallow for many people.

The Dodo

In his final chapter Mr. Kooreman takes us to the symbolic highlight of an evolutionary dead-end: by lack of diversity you will get a shortage of adaptability and your [...]  will just like a dodo not take flight but go toward his doom, waddling slowly, and everybody will forget his call. That's a nice ending but not very evolutionary. I know that diversity is highly popular these days but it has not been shown that more diversity (what is that?) has any effect on adaptability. A dodo will not become more adaptable with more competing species, I guess. Dodos were very well adapted to their environment, of which man was not part. There are very flightless birds that are well adapted, even to man, such as the ostrich or the common hen.

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Biology concept are complex and often not very well understood, even amongst biologists. And that works two ways: biology concepts are further compromised as people are presented with the wrong concept and people are compromised getting the wrong biology explanations.

Even if there are several misunderstood biology concepts in Mr. Kooremans article, this does not diminish the value of his contribution to digital archiving.