THE ORIGIN AND ACCEPTANCE OF IDEAS“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence was a phrase made popular by Carl Sagan. However, Laplace writes: ‘The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.’ Also, David Hume wrote in 1748: ‘A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence’, and ‘No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.’ and Marcello Truzzi says: ‘An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.’” - rationalwiki.org

Although this dictum is often repeated, if examined, it is nothing more than the classic argument from authority: a new idea is labeled extraordinary by an authority and can then be ignored because its proofs are not extraordinary. But I present it here for another reason: as an example of an idea attributed to one person that has a long pedigree. This is the nature of ideas: they are seldom, if ever, truly original. In science, discoveries, like the hypotheses that precede them, have long histories. Extraordinary claims are accepted, not because extraordinary proof is found, but because the framing of claim as extraordinary erodes. This explains the “three stages of truth.”

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

This epigram is attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer, but here again, he wasn’t the first.

THE MATH OF BIOLOGYI was curious to know the history of what Lynn Margulis referred to as “the math of biology:” 1 + 1= 1.

“One plus one equals one, not two, in biology. One sperm plus one egg equals one fertile egg. But one sulfide-oxidizing eubacterium, a spirochete, plus one sulfidogenic archaebacterium, a thermoplasma, makes one eukaryote: 1+1=1." - Lynn Margulis (2009) Symbiogenesis. A New Principle of Evolution - Rediscovery of Boris Mikhaylovich Kozo-Polyansky (1890–1957), at the International conference: “Charles Darwin and modern biology,” Institute of the

One of dozens of slides Lynn Margulis used to illustrate her “math of biology” 1+1=1; as in one sperm and one egg equals one fertilized egg.

History of Science and Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburgh introducing the English translation by Victor Fet of Kozo-Polyansky’s 1924 book published by Harvard University Press.

In her many lectures, Lynn Margulis included the “math of biology” to point out the cytoskeleton of eukaryotes that allows them to open their cellular membranes and

bring the outside inside.

My search online returned an assortment of hits: the 1+1+1=1 homeschooling blog; a short YouTube video called One Plus One Equals One - Path To Zen; a 1915 silent movie; religious references to the 10th chapter of John ( “I and the Father are one.”); sermons by Dan Stone and Neville Goddard; an ad for a smartphone; a paper by Getschmann et al Binocular depth discrimination based on perspective: one plus one equals one; etc. But nothing that

provided a clue as to where Lynn Margulis might have gotten her idea.

Then Scott Gilbert pointed me to a paper by Paul A. Weiss titled, One Plus One Does Not Equal Two. I tracked the paper down to a 1971 book by Weiss, Within the Gates of Science and Beyond - Science in its cultural commitments, where it was reprinted as a chapter.

THE MATH OF SYSTEMSIn his position as the chairman of the Biology Division of the National Research Council in 1951, Weiss restructured biology into Molecular, Cellular, Genetic, Developmental, Regulatory, Group and Environmental, the fields still in use today. While acknowledging the power of the molecular biology, he understood that living systems require science at a variety of scales.

“In the system, the structure of the whole determines the operation of the parts; in the machine, the operation of

Lynn Margulis slide - 1+1=1 as the math of symbiogenesis

Margulis slide - SEM of Mixotricha paradoxa, a symbiotic consortium: anaerobic protist, spirochetes, and rod bacteria found in the hindgut microbial community of the termite Mastotermes darwiniensis in Australia.

the parts determines the outcome.” - Weiss (1969) Beyond Reductionism. Beacon Press, p.13

THE WHOLE IS MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTSWeiss, like Lynn Margulis, was a systems thinker. But his 1+1≠ 2 formula points to the emergent properties of systems, often referred to in the phrase “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” In One Plus One Does Not Equal Two (p. 214), Weiss notes that it is the word “more” that is problematic. “Look at this phrasing and you will discover the root of the distrust, and indeed, outright rejection, of the valid principle behind it. What did they mean by stating that ‘an organism is more than the sum of its cells and humors’; that ‘a cell is more than its content of molecules’... and so on? As the term ‘more’ unquestionably connotes some tangible addition, an algebraic plus, one naturally had to ask: ‘More of what? Dimensions, mass, electric charges?’ Surely none of those. Then what? Perhaps something unfathomable, weightless, chargeless, nonmaterial? All sorts of agents have indeed been invoked in that capacity-entelechy, elan vital, formative drive, vital principle--all idle words, unpalatable to most scientists for being just fancy names for

an unknown X. Unfortunately, in their aversion to the supernatural, the scientific purists poured out the baby with the intellectually soiled bath water by repudiating the very aspects of wholeness in nature that had conjured up those cover terms for ignorance. And as a prophylactic against their resurgence, they fostered a militantly doctrinaire ‘reductionism,’ which axiomatically prescribed that all the relevant macroinformation about nature must, and eventually will, be

derived completely from adding up and piecing together the microinformations about the smallest sample units. Never mind that physics had to give up that claim gradually

Margulis slide en español - Origen del Citosqueleto

Margulis slide - lecture en español “The Math of Biology”

as Boltzmann's thermodynamics, Planck's quantum theory, and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle came on the scene. The life sciences have failed to follow suit and break out of the strait jacket of a doctrine for which their own subject matter furnished the most telling disproof. They might have come around more readily, though, if they had realized that systems with aspects of wholeness are by no means confined to living nature, but are of universal occurrence. In fact, their very universality should clear them of the stigma of vitalism.”

1+1 = 2A decade after Weiss wrote the above, Richard Dawkins states the following in The Extended Phenotype - The long reach of the gene (p. 6).

“The intervening years since Darwin have seen an astonishing retreat from his individual-centred stand, a lapse into sloppily unconscious group selectionism... It is only in recent years, ...that the stampede has been halted and turned. We painfully struggled back, harassed by sniping from a Jesuitically sophisticated and dedicated neo-group-selectionist rearguard, until we finally regained Darwin's ground, the position that I am characterizing by the label 'the selfish organism', the position which, in its modern form, is dominated by the concept of inclusive fitness.” Dawkins confuses Neo-Darwinism with the very different ground of Darwin. Darwin believed in acquired characteristics. He did not know the so-called Modern Synthesis or the idea of a “gene” (defined as either that which produces a trait or as a stretch of DNA that encodes a protein). Darwin practiced the antiquated study of whole organisms and the “tangled bank.”

EROSIONThe very recent and fast growing recog-nition in medicine and science of holobionts and microbiomes argues decisively against notions of animal individuality and inclusive fitness. Neo-Darwinist molecular biology did not anticipate the 4D nature of the genome, natural genetic engineering, gene duplications, horizontal

Margulis slide - Chatton course board from 1942

gene transfer, hybridization or symbiogenesis. It is those who formerly dismissed these ideas as “extraordinary” who find themselves in the midst of a revolution in their thinking about biology, evolution and Earth systems science. The history of symbiosis research is known. It dates back well over a century. The timing of the current revolution is due to contributions from multiple disciplines, including NASA planetary studies, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, fractal math, digital super computing and--as something of an unintended consequence of--molecu-lar biology. Ignorance justified by the label “extraordinary” is being eroded away.

In Our Final Century (p. 153), Martin Rees, former President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, points out the shortcomings of

extrapolation from any static, narrow, or single scale view.

“There are laws of nature in the macroscopic domain thatare just as much of a challenge as anything in the micro world,and are conceptually autonomous from it--for instance, those that describe the transition between regular and chaotic behaviour, which apply to phenomena as

disparate as dripping water pipes and animal populations. Problems in chemistry, biology, the environment, and human sciences remain unsolved because scientists haven't elucidated the patterns, structures, and interconnections, not because we don't understand subatomic physics well enough. In trying to understand how water waves break, and how insects behave, analysis at the atomic level doesn't help. Finding the ‘readout’ of the human genome--discovering the string of molecules that encode our genetic inheritance--is an amazing achievement. But it is just the prelude to the far greater challenge of post-genomic science: understanding how the genetic code triggers the assembly of proteins and expresses itself in a developing embryo.”

Paul Weiss offered three propositions that expose “the artificial dichotomy between modes of thought centered either on elements or on continua, each to the exclusion or invalidation of the other.” (ibid p. 222-223)

Margulis slide - en español of nucleo-cytoskeleton: kinetosome-centrioles

“First, that collectives tend to display novel features not discernible in their component units, hence justly called ‘emergent’; second, that such features are indicative of the existence of significant relationships among the members of the collective, such relationships being severed by physical or mental separation of the members from each other; and, third, that whenever one is faced with static geometric regularities of patterns, he ought to look beyond them or rather behind them--for the rules in the play of forces that have shaped them. In thus raising the sights from statics to dynamics, static interrelationships become dynamlc-interactions, and in the case of self-sustaining systems--with the conservative features of wholeness, simple interactions become interdependencies. States then appear as but cross-sections through trains of behavior along the time-line, scalar values must be supplemented--by vectorial interconnections and vector systems of specifiable integral properties become realities. Let us then keep in mind that this progression from elements to groups objectively reflects the ascending scale of supplemental statements we need for adequate description of corresponding objects of our experience.”

HIJACKING SYMBIOGENESIS

Intrinsic to the definition of symbiosis and symbiogenesis is dynamic interaction. Terms which reduce symbioses to static states (e.g. parasitic, commensal, mutual) are unhelpful because they produce a false sense of understanding. Parasitism incorrectly defines a symbiotic interaction as a one-way relationship. This unacknowledged reduction of dynamic processes to static states can also be seen in Thomas Cavalier-Smith’s distinction of “a true organelle of symbiogenetic origin” from “an obligate intracellular symbiont”.

“I pointed out that integration of foreign genomes into the host nucleus can occur only after the host evolves novel, generalized protein-targeting machinery that can place many products of transferred genes back into the former symbiont. I used the presence or absence of such machinery— e.g., the protein-import machinery of mitochondria and chloroplasts—to establish a clear-cut boundary between a symbiont that lacks it and a symbiogenetic organelle that has it. This provides objective demarcation between symbiosis, which is very common, and symbiogenesis, which is exceedingly rare.” - Cavalier-Smith (2003) Microbial Muddles, BioScience, 53 (10): 1008-1013.

Margulis slide - definition and context: symbiosis is ecological; symbiogenesis is evolutionary

This is a classic example of Weiss’s “mental separation” where a static model replaces a dynamic reality. Cavalier-Smith, a self-proclaimed Neo-Darwinian protozoologist, is absolutely certain in the sweep of random mutation.

“Except for the six established cases of symbiogenesis, all differences between eukaryotic species or bacterial strains have arisen by mutation, plus occasional lateral transfer of individual genes or small gene clusters, not by the symbiogenetic merger of genomes. Mutation is the greatest innovator by far. Even lateral gene transfer is less innovative and less frequent than widely supposed.” - ibid

But this argument is a straw man wielded as Occam’s broom. He has used his “demarcation” to completely redefine symbiogenesis. It is his reframing of what symbiogenesis means that makes symbiogenesis “exceedingly rare.” This change in how symbiogenesis has been defined for more than a century is presumptuous and problematic. Problematic because it has been adopted by John Archibald in his book, One Plus One Equals One - Symbiosis and the Evolution of Complex Life creating a void in terminology that symbiogenesis, properly defined, fills. “When it comes to describing such complex interspecies metabolic networks biologists are presently at a loss for words.” - John Archibald (2014) One Plus One Equals One - Symbiosis and the Evolution of Complex Life. Kindle ed. p. 170

WHAT IS SYMBIOSIS AND SYMBIOGENESIS?These terms have been used for more than a century and they have definitions on which scientists, particularly those in the field of symbiosis research, agree.

“[Merezhkowsky] offered the term symbiogenesis for ‘the origin of organisms by the combination or by the association of two or several beings which enter into symbiosis’.” - Sapp, Carrapiço, Zolotonosov (2002) Symbiogenesis: The Hidden Face of Constantin Merezhkowsky. Hist. Phil. Life Sci., 24: 413-440

“‘Symbiosis’ refers to long term, permanent, sometimes cyclical, for example, seasonal, physical association between members of different species or other different taxa in general. To define ‘symbiosis’ one ought to follow the original definition of the German scientist Anton de Bary (1831–1888). Symbiosis refers to a physical association between ‘differently named’ partners, at least two kinds, that endures for most of the life history of the organisms. Or for at least most or all of the life history of one of them. … Symbioses are ecological relationships that, over a long period of time, may become symbiogenesis. In cases where new behaviors, structures or taxa, i.e., new tissues, new organs, new species, new genera, or even new phyla emerge, new relationships at many different levels [i.e., anatomic, metabolic, genetic] can be identified as the consequence of symbiosis, then symbiogenesis has been

demonstrated. I argue that first of all, symbiogenesis is not ever random. …As the brilliant young Boris Mikhaylovich Kozo-Polyansky (1890–1957)

recognized in his abstract of 1921, symbiogenesis is the major source of innovation in evolution. … unlike his Russian predecessors K.S. Mereschkovsky [Merezhkowsky] (1855–1921) and A.S. Famintsyn (1835–1918), Kozo-Polyansky recognized and did not reject the Darwin-Wallace concept of natural selection. Kozo-Polyansky showed symbiogenesis generated the original novelty, whereas Darwin-Wallace natural selection followed, maintained and perpetuated it. Natural selection, an elimination process, perpetuates symbiogenesis but does not generate innovation in the evolutionary process. Kozo-Polyansky realized that it was not possible for evolution to establish new species without all three evolutionary phenomena taken together. First ‘biotic potential,’ the tendency of all species, all kinds of organisms, every group, every population, always to grow at a rate unsupportable by its immediate environment. The growth rate of all populations exceeds the capacity of the local environment to maintain the rate of flow of matter and energy required to sustain it. Second, whence the appearance of inherited novelty? The generation of inherited novelty, according to Kozo-Polyansky, was by symbiogenesis followed by [Third] natural selection. … In the language of ‘systems theory’ evolution is a system and like in the processes of any system one cannot privilege one over other of the parts; all parts are required for the system to function. Kozo-Polyansky understood this when, in 1921, he was 30 or 31 years old.” - Lynn Margulis, ibid.

”He [Kozo-Polyanski] knew, and we know now, that we live on an Earth more aliveand more complicated than the Neo-Darwinists (or even the more humble of us) can describe or explain. Our world is a prodigy of its grand and profound past, its millions of years of natural history.” - Lynn Margulis, ibid.

Margulis slides - the ancient Indo-European word “Dghem”, the root for Earth, human, humus and humility

I do not know where Lynn Margulis’s idea for the “math of biology” came from, she may have read Paul Weiss, found his math of systems memorable and modified it to her own use. It had some provenance as all ideas do. When it comes to ideas, On the Origin of Mitosing Cells (Lynn Sagan [Margulis], 1967) is truly eye-opening when read in its entirety today. Her 2009 paper, Symbiogenesis. A New Principle of Evolution - Rediscovery of Boris Mikhaylovich Kozo-Polyansky (1890–1957) also presents material she included in the new edition of her magnum opus, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (retitled Symbiogenetics, unpublished) which she finished shortly before her death.

NEW BOOK BY SUZAN MAZUR”Major scientists from a dozen countries present evidence that a paradigm shift is underway or has already taken place, replacing neo-Darwinism (the standard model of evolution based on natural selection following the accumulation of random genetic mutations) with a vastly richer evolutionary synthesis than previously thought possible.” - Amazon BooksInterviews include:•Geneticist, Mae Won Ho•Cell Biologist and Plant Specialist, František Baluška•Physicist, Adrian Bejan•Neurobiologist, Jonathan Delafield-Butt•Virologist, Ricardo Flores •Neuroscientist, David Edelman•Physicist, Nigel Goldenfeld•Computational Biologist, Eugene Koonin•Biosemiotician, Kaveli Kull•Biologist, Eviatar Nevo•Cellular Biologist, Stuart Newman•Physiologist and Systems Biologist, Denis Noble•Engineer, Raju Pookattil•Applied Mathematician, Peter Saunders•Microgeneticist, James Shapiro•Biologist, Corradi Spadafora•Virologist, Luis Perez Villarreal•Philosopher of Biology, Günther Witzany•Biophysicist, Carl Woese 

NEW BOOK BY FRANK RYANThe Mysterious World of the Human Genome, has earned a starred review in the Kirkus Reviews.

“Frank Ryan has written the ultimate DNA memoir. In a lively, entertaining voice, Ryan takes us back to a time when no one knew where our hereditary information was kept, and then he puts us on a rollicking ride to the present. On the way, we learn about the evolution of genomes, the genomes of our ancestors, epigenetics, how DNA works, and how although most DNA doesn’t code for proteins, this does not make it junk DNA. This is a great read for both nonscientists and scientists who had their biology classes more than ten years ago.” - Marc Zimmer, author of Illuminating Disease: An Introduction to Green Fluorescent Proteins

NEW STUDY ADDS TO EVIDENCE THAT LYME DISEASE SPIROCHETES MAY BE SEXUALLY TRANSMITTEDMiddelveen et al (Sept 2015) Culture and identification of Borrelia spirochetes in human vaginal and seminal secretions reported the following results:

“Control subjects who were asymptomatic and seronegative for Bb had no detectable spirochetes in genital secretions by PCR analysis. In contrast, spirochetes were observed in cultures of genital secretions from 11 of 13 subjects diagnosed with Lyme disease, and motile spirochetes were detected in genital culture concentrates from 12 of 13 Lyme disease patients using light and darkfield microscopy. Morphological features of spirochetes were confirmed by Dieterle silver staining and immunohistochemical staining of culture concentrates. Molecular hybridization and PCR testing confirmed that the spirochetes isolated from semen and vaginal secretions were strains of Borrelia, and all cultures were negative for treponemal spirochetes. PCR sequencing of cultured spirochetes from three couples having unprotected sex indicated that two couples had identical strains of Bb sensu stricto in their semen and vaginal secretions, while the third couple had identical strains of B. hermsii detected in their genital secretions.Conclusions: The culture of viable Borrelia spirochetes in genital secretions suggests that Lyme disease could be transmitted by intimate contact from person to person.”

Micro-videography of Borrelia spirochetes in their “string of pearls” morphology (as reported by Morten Laane) emerging from human red blood cells can be seen at www.counsellingme.com.

“There is no evidence that Lyme disease is transmitted from person-to-person through touching, kissing, or having sex with a person who has Lyme disease.” - CDC. - Lyme Disease: What You Need to Know