Darwin and the tree of life
A century and a half ago, Charles R. Darwin spread one of the most fertile and powerful ideas in biology: all living things have the same ancestor, they all have the same origin, we are all relatives. So, the relationships between all organisms today and those that have existed in the past can be represented with a tree diagram. The tree of life, with its extinct branches sunk into the ground, in the fossil record, and its thick canopy of living species today, is a very powerful Darwinian image. It was soon adopted by the naturalists to replace the old and incorrect idea of the great chain of being: a ladder that ascended from insignificant worms to exalted humans, touching the gods. With the Darwinian tree of life, there would never be higher and lower organisms, or more or less evolved ones. Biochemical techniques and current computational methods have allowed us to reconstruct the universal phylogenetic tree, making Darwin's dream come true, while at the same time we have found unsuspected family relationships, such as those resulting from symbiosis. This expands their value far beyond what Darwin could ever imagine. But in addition to the obvious scientific interest of the tree of life and the discovery of phylogenetic relationships in the current biosphere, these researches are useful and also have practical applications. Ultimately, in a more precise way, they will allow us to answer the question: who are we?
Lynn Margulis: a revolution in evolution
Darwin proposed the simile of a tree to represent the evolutionary relationships between living organisms. This powerful metaphor is still valid today, even though we know of phenomena that can disrupt the architecture of continuous ramifications throughout the evolutionary process. A reality that Darwin did not consider was that the branches of the tree would not only bifurcate but, eventually, could fuse and unite to give a new evolutionary entity. The symbiosis between simple cells was the process that originated one of the most profound discontinuities in the biosphere: the prokaryotic and eukaryotic cellular structure. At the end of the nineteenth, some scientists, especially botanists of the Russian school, sensed the creative power of the fusion of the branches of the tree of life. In the middle of the 20th century, the American biologist Lynn Margulis collected this evidence and integrated all the information there, especially from biology and geology, to draw a large scheme of the origin of eukaryotic complexity. This symbiotic model has been modified and expanded to the current explanation of the emergence of nucleated cells. In this sense, we owe Margulis the expansion of the Darwinian explanation of the origin of species through cooperation..
Brief CV
Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Valencia, he has done research at the CSIC and the universities of Valencia, Essen, Pennsylvania and Paris XI. Member of the Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology group of the Institute of Integrative Biology of Systems I2SysBio (UV-CSIC) and of the Biological Sciences Section of the Institute of Catalan Studies. He is interested in the bioprospecting of inhospitable environments, the structure and evolution of metabolism, as well as the history of ideas about the natural origin and the artificial synthesis of life. In addition to research articles, he is the author of informative texts. He directed the scientific dissemination collection "Sense Fronteres" (1995-2006) of the University of Valencia and Edicions Bromera and collaborates with the Chair of Science Dissemination at the UV. He is co-author of the textbook Fundamentals of Biochemistry and curator of the Catalan edition of Lubert Stryer's Bioquímica manual. He has been secretary of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL - The International Astrobiology Society). Among the books he has most recently edited are La ciència a taula (articles by F. Sapiña)” (Monographs from the Mètode magazine) and Iluminando la evolución humana: 150 años después de Darwin ("Sin Fronteras" collection).
More information
- https://www.uv.es/pereto/
- Juli Peretó and Antonio Lazcano analyse how Lynn Margulis related cell evolution and planetary changes
- El futur genètic (evolutiu) de la humanitat
- Bricolaje y oportunismo en la evolución del metabolismo
- El origen del coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, a la luz de la evolución
- COVID-19 y el lado oscuro de la promiscuidad de la vida
Social networks
- @JuliPereto
- @i2sysbio
- @BiologiquesUV
- @mtbolic
- @CdCienciaUV
- @MednightGTS
Stimulating scientific vocations is a project of the Scientific Culture and Innovation Unit of the University of Valencia, which has co-funding from the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology and the Ministry of Science and Innovation.
