Brainstorming life

working draft

A provocative article about new developments in molecular evolution New Scientist (21 January 2009, No 2692, pp. 34-39), has me thinking that biology has used something very similar to the generic process of human brainstorming to create a lot of creatures--life as we know it. Seems that sequencing DNA and other biomolecules has revealed that there has been a hell of a lot of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) going on across all the life forms on this planet. Horizontal gene transfer means one life form or organism picks up some genetic material from another--perhaps very different--life form (through a traveling virus, through a direct mash-up, etc.), incorporates it, and if all goes well, this thing goes about its business as a slightly different life form passing this new hybrid combo down through its descendants. Investigating these HGTs has uncovered some weirdness and prompted some wild new thinking. Like this: the cow genome contains a piece of snake DNA...and you know cows and snakes don't ever be having sex. Or wrap your mind around this: The starfish Luidia sarsi starts life as a little jelly-like larva, then metamorphoses into a starfish. It's almost like it's two different organisms. It turns out it might be! Some evolutionary biologists are now thinking that many organisms that go through radical metamorphoses (including catepillars -> moths/butterflys) are really an oddly working mashup of two different organisms...who can't really fully live together so have adapted by taking turns "coming out." That's the wildest thing I've read about biology and evolution in a long time. And it got me thinking... These HGT mashups are very very similar to the basic process that brainstorming relies on to produce creative ideas. New creative ideas (e.g., new insights about human culture, retail consumption, etc.) result when the human brain connects two or more otherwise/previously unrelated "things" (facts, concepts, objects, feelings, etc., etc.,) together to create a new "thing" out of their pieces or parts. Many new ideas are conceptual hybrids. And now we learn that a lot of life forms are biological hybrids. It's as if evolution was impatient and wanted greater diversity than it was getting from the process of reproductive variation within species and created these different "brainstorming techniques" for mashing-up all sorts of biomolecular stuff that normally didn't go together to see if anything new and improved would result. In biology as well as in brainstorming, most of these experiments don't work, they don't live to find a life and a home of their own. But when they do...we say, "wow," that's different, that's new, that's creative. What if the mash-up process behind "brainstorming" new ideas (and behind YouTube video mashups!) and the mash-up process behind new creatures follows very similar principles? You can almost hear the general-systems theorists cooing.