Of Goethe, genomes and how babies are made

Henry Gee explains why Goethe, not Darwin, had the right ideas about evolution. Ideas
that we are only now beginning to understand.
10 February 2000

HENRY GEE

It's been an amazing day. My wife is 20 weeks pregnant with our second child, and we
have just been to the hospital to see an ultrasound scan of the newest addition to the
family. Gee Minimus (as we're calling it, so far) is already a fully formed human being.
We can see its backbone and ribs, and the chambers of its heart as they pump blood round
the body. We can see its head, brain, arms, legs, fingers, toes, stomach, diaphragm,
spleen, gall bladder, kidneys, and so on, and on -- all in a fetus 20 centimetres long. In
fact, Gee Minimus has been fully formed for 8 weeks. Most of the rest of pregnancy is
about refinement and simple growth -- all the delicate work is over.

This miracle happens everywhere, every day. Consider: a fertilized egg divides and
differentiates to create a new human, containing trillions of cells, each belonging to one
of more than 200 separate cell types. The process happens so quickly, in something so
small, that its fidelity is breathtaking. It is amazing that, excepting rare and tragic
mishaps, human couples have offspring that are recognizably human. We do not suddenly
hatch ostriches or have elephants or giraffes. Nor do these animals ever produce human
babies, either. They always have (respectively) ostriches, elephants and giraffes.

All this leads up to a single question: if the process is so consistent in every species, how
is it that the Earth contains such a rich diversity of different species? The question of the
origin of species must, fundamentally, be about the evolution of developmental programs,
or whatever mysterious process it is that has made Gee Minimus from a microscopic cell
into a human form, recognizable as such, in only 12 weeks.

You could look to Darwin for an answer -- but you would look in vain. Darwin studied
tiny variations in external features, suggested how variations might be favored by external
circumstances, and extrapolated the process to the entire tree of life. But surely, there are
deeper questions to be asked than why moths have wings that are black rather than white,
or why orchids have petals that are this shape or that? Why, do moths have wings at all,
and why do orchids have petals? What creates these structures in the first place?

The victory of Darwinism has been so complete that it is a shock to realize just how
empty the Darwinian view of life really is. In the 1890s, evolutionary biologists
condemned Darwinian explanations for the history of life as vacuous speculation. In
1894, the English biologist William Bateson wrote:

" 'If,' say we with much circumlocution, 'the course of Nature followed the lines we have
suggested, then, in short, it did.' That is the sum of our argument."

Bateson and other biologists turned instead to experimental biology. Experiments, at

least, counted as proper science. Ironically it is Bateson's intellectual legatees --
geneticists -- who now have the technological means to address the questions that Darwin
ignored: the source of shape and structure, and how it is that babies are made.

Like so much else in biology, it all goes back to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet,
dramatist, politician, savant and general all-round genius. Goethe died in 1832, when
Charles Darwin was barely three months into his five-year voyage aboard HMS Beagle.
Goethe was convinced that for all the dazzling variety we see in the natural world, there is
still an underlying unity to nature. It was he who invented 'morphology' -- the science of
organic form. He speculated, for example, that all the organs of plants are modified
leaves, and that the bones of the skull are modified vertebrae.

Only now can we begin to appreciate the insights of Goethe's genius. Geneticists are
untangling the control of development, and have created mutant plants in which petals
look more like leaves. Although it may be a crude generalization to say that plant organs
are modified leaves, it is true that plants use common developmental programs in
different ways to create different organs.

Similarly, nobody nowadays believes that the bones of the skull are modified vertebrae.
But the past twenty years in biology have seen the discovery of a set of genes, the so-
called 'Hox' genes, that direct the formation of organs in all animals, such that they
correspond to the appropriate segment of the body. Disruption of these genes in
vertebrates such as mice leads, for example, to neck vertebrae developing as if they
belonged to the thorax. At last, Goethe's speculations on the unity of nature, combined
with Bateson's experimental approach, are leading to new insights into the creation of
organic form. And nobody mentioned Darwin.

This fusion of experimental biology with the almost poetic 'nature philosophy' of Goethe
seems like a bizarre meeting of modern and archaic; like something out of Star Wars, in
which the Jedi Knights discuss their ancient codes of ethics while piloting their ships into
hyperspace.

This fusion has been called 'evolutionary developmental biology', and it seeks to
investigate the relationship between evolution and development: to resolve the apparent
contradiction between the consistency of individual development and the diversity of the
natural world. In so doing, it will shed light on Goethe's unity of nature, and answer the
'big questions' of biology. The ones that children ask their parents. The ones about how
we come to be the way we are.

But even as it is being born, evolutionary developmental biology is already changing. A

draft human genome is expected this summer. Already the genomes of many simple
organisms -- several bacteria and viruses, brewer's yeast, a species of fly and a humble
roundworm -- are known and hardly a month goes by without another falling to the high-
tech gene sequencers. Now the genome of a plant, Arabidopsis thaliana (a member of the
mustard family), is well on the way to completion. Within a few years we will know
hundreds, maybe thousands, of genomes of all kinds of organisms. And what then?

The fact that all organisms have genomes, made of DNA, is itself a powerful vindication
of Goethe's concept of the underlying unity of nature. Once we have genomes of many
different organisms, we will be able to compare their structures and function. Think of it:
if genomes were not similar in some fundamental way, this would not be possible.

We will be able to map how genes interact to direct the development of an organism. By
comparing these interactions from organism to organism, we will understand how and
why the development of different organisms is, indeed, different.

We will be able to understand how it is that nature is at once so unified and so diverse.

We will learn how and why we always turn out human, and do not give birth to ostriches,
elephants or giraffes.

We will learn how babies are made.

© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2001