Selfish metabolism
Selfish metabolism
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自私的新陈代谢
DOI：
10.1002/cplx.20258
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发表时间：
2008
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Vijayasarathy Srinivasan
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
H. Morowitz;Eric Smith;Vijayasarathy Srinivasan
进化生物学历来重视自私的概念。查尔斯·达尔文减少了对个体之间可遗传变异和竞争的适应(以及不太令人满意的专门化)。随着对遗传和形态发生的遗传控制的理解变得更加复杂，理查德·道金斯主张在某种程度上取代自私，从有机体到它的基因。这种观点使得群体遗传学的许多数学方面的亲缘选择、病毒感染和基因组印记变得直观和自然；尽管它可能低估了在发育过程中共同作用的基因之间分配进化功劳的难度。将RNA世界作为生命的第一个化学阶段的某些提议甚至走到了试图保留自我的地步，同时可能会消灭细胞。溶液中或表面上微小的自私RNA被认为相互竞争，从短暂的原始有机物混合物中复制潜力和原材料，就像现代病毒与细胞的宿主基因组竞争消耗细胞的新陈代谢资源一样。在所有这些场景中，自私带来了两种截然不同的概念。一种是贪婪，在这种贪婪中，现有的秩序状态竞相增加自己的实例化，以牺牲他人的利益为代价。另一种是个体性的概念，无论是有机体、基因还是自我复制的RNA分子。在达尔文的进化论中，以及在现代生活的许多实际应用中，两者确实是紧密相连的。然而，这并不一定总是这样(即使在今天)，因为进化理论家们开始认识到，每当病毒和宿主基因定义了两个共存的、不可公度的自我概念，或者当他们认为二倍体生物体中父母印记的单倍型在基因上不完整，不能形成细胞，但却具有跨越多代生物体的身份。此外，生物学的某些领域似乎根本没有在这种自私的范式中得到充分的捕捉。生态学关注的是强大而有序的关系网络，这些关系网络本身不是任何个体或分类群的属性。而试图将生态系统想象成超级有机体(尽管是盖亚)也无济于事，因为生态系统不服从简单孟德尔遗传的数学，它们也不竞争；它们以一种嘈杂的演替方式通过顺序形式的关联。如果我们试图理解…，生态系统的贪婪但非个人主义的本质就变得特别突出
E volutionary biology has traditionally made much of the concept of selfishness. Charles Darwin reduced adaptation (and to a less satisfying degree, specia-tion) to the heritable variation and competition among individuals. As understanding of the genetic control of heredity and morphogenesis has become more sophisticated, Richard Dawkins has advocated displacing selfishness somewhat, from the organism to its genes. This perspective makes many mathematical aspects of the population genetics of kin selection, viral infection, and genomic imprinting intuitive and natural; though it perhaps underemphasizes the difficulty of apportioning evolutionary credit among genes that act in concert during development. Certain proposals for the RNA world as a first chemical stage of life have even gone so far as to attempt to keep the self while possibly doing away with the cell. Tiny, selfish RNAs in solution or on surfaces are imagined to have competed with one another for replicating potential and raw materials from a transient pri-mordial mixture of organics, much as modern viruses compete with a cell's host genome for consumption of the cell's metabolic resources. In all these scenarios, selfishness brings together two very different notions. One is a kind of greediness, in which existing states of order compete to increase their own instantiation at the expense of others. The other is a notion of individuality , whether of the organism, gene, or self-replicating RNA molecule. In Darwin's theory of evolution, and for many practical applications to modern life, the two are indeed tightly coupled. However, this need not always be so (even today), as evolutionary theorists are coming to recognize whenever viral and host genes define two co-present and incommensurable notions of self, or when they consider that the parentally imprinted haplotype in a diploid organism is both genetically incomplete to make a cell, and yet has an identity that spans multiple generations of organisms. Moreover, certain areas of biology do not seem adequately captured in this selfish paradigm at all. Ecology concerns robust and richly ordered networks of relations, which are not properties of any of the individuals or taxa per se. And it doesn't help to try to envision ecosystems (Gaia notwithstanding) as super-organisms , because ecosystems don't obey the mathematics of simple Mendelian heredity and they don't compete; they pass through sequential forms of relatednesses in a sort of noisy succession. The greedy but non-individualistic nature of ecosystems becomes especially salient if we try to understand …