Sydney Brenner's 10-on-10

The following sections are included:

• CONTENTS
• FOREWORD by Sydney Brenner
• INTRODUCTION by Benjamin Seet

Complexity in the cosmos

We live in an epoch of cosmic history which not only allows our very existence, but also offers us a unique and precious opportunity to understand the universe.

For thousands of years, philosophers, astronomers and scientists thought of the universe as rather like a stage setting—a fixed, unchanging space within which the planets, stars and other heavenly bodies had been set in motion…

Inside nature’s biochemistry laboratory

The genetic code drives all biological life. But even a mechanism this fundamental rests on still more ancient biochemical processes, as well as the intriguing chemical properties of a seemingly nondescript material—clay.

While many biologists today delve into genome sequences to understand how organisms evolved, the history of life on Earth is not written solely in DNA. Clues to this history are also inscribed in something far more ancient: metabolism, the intricate networks of biochemical reactions that make our cells hum…

How chemistry begat biology

How did biological life emerge from chemical building blocks on Earth? This is a difficult but not insurmountable question, and an answer may well be within our reach.

Barring the invention of a time machine, we will never be able to travel billions of years into the past to observe precisely how life unfolded on Earth…

How modern-day cells evolved their complexity

By continuously reshuffling their genetic material, primordial cells progressively acquired more complex adaptations that allowed them to survive even the most unthinkable of challenges.

Today, all living organisms can be broadly divided into three domains: archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes. While archaea and bacteria are single-celled organisms that lack cellular compartments, eukaryotes comprise plants, animals, fungi and protists, whose cells carry distinct nuclei and other membrane-enclosed organelles…

Multicellular animals and the need for nerves

Complex, multicellular animals can trace their origins to a single type of cell that gradually diversified into the many types we see today, each with their own specialised function.

After the first cellular organisms evolved, they enjoyed life as single cells for about three billion years. Although bacteria, algae and fungi all flirted with communal living from time to time, their multicellular co-ops were usually temporary and never became the dominant way of life. Being unicellular was sufficient and, in fact, an extraordinarily successful strategy…

The sometimes circuitous path of vertebrate evolution

For all their diversity and complexity, modern-day vertebrates are simply variations on a theme established during the first 100 million years of their evolution.

A leafy seadragon delicately floating amidst a bed of seagrass, a peregrine falcon closing in on a kill and a giraffe towering over the savannah may not seem to have very much in common at first glance. But in fact, they are united by a single evolutionary thread. Despite their enormous range of shapes and diversity in lifestyles, all three animals are vertebrates and have a shared body plan: a skull, a backbone and paired limbs…

The explosive evolution of fish

Because humans can be thought of as a highly modified form of bony fish, the story of fish evolution is part of our own evolutionary history.

As far as animals with backbones go, no class of vertebrates is as wonderfully diverse as fishes. Take for example the longest known fish in the world, the giant oarfish, which at 17 metres is more than 200 times longer than the smallest fish in the world, the eight-millimetre-long Paedocypris progenetica. Size aside, fish lifetimes also vary wildly, ranging from the pygmy goby which lives for at most two months to the Greenland shark which lives an average of 400 years…

The first time vertebrates had sex

With the help of extremely rare, well-preserved fossils, we can trace complicated sexual behaviours back to ancient armoured fishes called placoderms.

Whether it is the conspicuous and cumbersome tail feathers of a peacock or the boisterous and bloody battles of male elephant seals, sex undoubtedly comes at a cost. Finding a mate can use up a lot of energy and involves taking risks. From an evolutionary point of view, sex is not an efficient way of sharing genes, passing only 50 percent of a parent’s genetic material on to the next generation…

Piecing together the puzzle of mammalian evolution

Chromosomes break and recombine, generating a wealth of genetic diversity that may have been critical for the evolution of mammals.

Looking at a pet cat or dog, it is perhaps difficult to imagine that these mammals are descended from scaly, cold-blooded reptiles. But about 300 million years ago, the first mammal-like reptiles—known as synapsids—appeared, and, over many millennia, evolved some of the defining features of today’s mammals. They became warm-blooded, grew hair or fur, gave birth to live young and nursed their offspring with milk from specialised glands…

Mapping our evolutionary origins

With a fragmented fossil record and a lack of clear boundaries between species, there is still no clear consensus on the nature of the family tree of Homo sapiens and our distant relatives. But new taxonomic approaches now offer researchers better methods for mapping its branches.

To Charles Darwin, writing down his ideas on natural selection felt at once thrilling and frightening. “It is like confessing a murder,” he confided to a friend in a letter in 1844. Due to religious and public sentiment at the time, On The Origin of Species, eventually published in 1859, contained a mere passing mention of the controversial subject of human evolution…

How extinct hominins live on in people today

The genomes of now-extinct archaic humans can help us understand more about what makes modern-day humans truly unique.

Just as old letters, photographs and manuscripts can help historians piece together the past, the human genome—all three billion base pairs of it—offers scientists a vast repository of information with which to reconstruct the genetic history of our species. From this, we know that anatomically modern humans—who were essentially indistinguishable from you and me—evolved in Africa some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, and subsequently ventured out to colonise the rest of the world…

How big brains came to be

Widely regarded as the crowning glory of our species, the human brain is an extremely complicated organ, and the story of its origins highlights some of the most important principles of evolution.

Gaze into the eyes of our closest living primate cousins, the chimpanzees, and one might glimpse a familiar intelligence—not the raging bonfire of human intellect, but perhaps, a spark that never took to kindling…

The ascendance of human intelligence

By picking the brains of non-human primates, we can uncover clues about how Homo sapiens came to acquire its impressive capacity for learning.

The human infant has often been described as a blank slate. Yet, an underlying assumption of this description is a newborn’s remarkable ability to learn. From manipulating objects and producing speech to the reading and writing of text, the human child is inherently capable of acquiring complex knowledge and skills throughout his or her lifetime…

Seeking the roots of human language within the tree of life

Human language leaves behind no fossil record, but scientists can use comparative biology and genetics to piece together the evolutionary origins of our gift of speech.

Within a year of birth, the human infant begins to babble sounds that approximate simple words. Parents everywhere hail this as a significant milestone and appear visibly impressed, despite the fact that language acquisition is very much a part of every child’s normal development. But perhaps such a reaction is warranted—the faculty of language is what sets us apart from all other species in the animal kingdom…

Why the material matters

The logic of evolutionary theory can help us understand how human culture arrived at where we are today, and where we are headed next.

As the preceding chapters demonstrate, Darwin’s theory of evolution has been extraordinarily successful at explaining the biology of human beings. Distant events in our past—from the Big Bang to how fish left the water and how primates evolved large brains—all start to make sense when seen in the light of evolution…

How information processing governs the past, present and future of our species

From physical tools to tools for thought, our ability and need to process information has driven the development of human societies throughout the ages.

When seeking answers to questions about human evolution, the biological perspective has yielded invaluable insights. But as an archaeologist, I am of the view that, while crucial to piecing together the past, genetics and anatomy are not the only things that matter in the very long history of our species…

The dynamic, living entity that is language

Biological evolution gave rise to the human faculty for language, but language itself also evolves as it is transmitted among individuals and across generations.

Speaking a language comes instinctively to most individuals. In contrast, speaking about language is much less intuitive. Multiple phenomena are involved in the production and use of language, making it challenging to articulate why language is the way it is and how it came to be…

The nature and evolution of technology

Technologies evolve in a combinatorial fashion, with each new technology forming a building block for future inventions.

Consider society and how it functions today—virtually every aspect of it depends on technology. From the physical structures we build to the devices we use, technology has woven itself into the very fabric of human civilisation…

How complexity takes a simple view on the dynamics of the new

The work of economist Joseph Schumpeter could help us understand the transition periods of evolution that drive innovation and are currently not explained by Darwinian theory.

At our present moment in history, we know a great deal about how our universe began and how life evolved. We now know that evolution is a universal phenomenon that applies not only to biology but also to society, the economy and almost every complex adaptive system known to mankind. But for all our recent advances, we still have much more to learn about evolution, how it progresses in the way that it does and how it might behave in the future…

Approaching planet Earth’s tipping point

Multiple indicators suggest that we are in a new geological age where the actions of human beings are destabilising the planet.

Over the past 4.5 billion years, the state of the Earth has largely been determined by planetary and geological dynamics. When massive volcanoes erupted 252 million years ago, it triggered the Great Dying, a mass extinction event that wiped out 96 percent of all marine life and 70 percent of all vertebrates on land. Similarly, when a giant asteroid hit the Earth 66 million years ago, catastrophic changes in climate brought an end to the era of the dinosaurs…

The power of evolutionary thinking

Even though Darwin’s theory of evolution is a simple concept at its core, evolutionary reasoning can help us make sense of the biggest questions in science, from the origin of life to the workings of the human brain.

For an idea that holds so much power, Darwin’s theory of evolution can be summarised in remarkably few words: in a population of multiplying organisms, variation exists in the hereditary traits that are passed from parent to offspring; if this variation affects the ability of organisms to survive or reproduce, then natural selection can occur…

Towards an extended evolutionary synthesis

At 80 years old, standard evolutionary theory needs an upgrade: a broader, more inclusive framework that will allow it to keep pace with rapid advances in other fields of biology.

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he did not know what a gene was. Evolutionary theory as we know it today, with its emphasis on genetic variation and inheritance, was forged in the 1930s and 1940s by leading thinkers in the field, who combined Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian inheritance and concepts from population genetics, palaeontology and other disciplines…

The inescapable present and our radically open future

Human beings are the only species able to see evolution from the inside, a view that has implications for how we see the future.

The preceding chapters have traced the course of evolution over millions, thousands and hundreds of years, bringing us now into the present. My claim is that we cannot escape the present, and so should adopt a humble view from inside evolution…

Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been powerfully strengthened by our understanding of the basic machinery of genetic determination, initiated by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953 with their model of DNA. The genetical theory of natural selection recognises that it is the genes that exist inside all organisms that will determine the changes in these organisms, all the way from the origin of life to the advent of humans…

The following sections are included:

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX
• IMAGE CREDITS