But a few years later, this story unraveled, and what had been confirmation of theory number two became a direct contradiction. Johnson discovered that his mutant worms actually had two genes that were different. In addition to AGE-1, there was another, unrelated gene defect (FER-15) on a separate chromosome. By crossbreeding, he was able to separate the two. Worms with the FER-15 mutation had impaired fertility without extended life spans. Worms with the AGE-1 mutation had extended life spans with unimpaired fertility. This was a full- fledged Darwinian paradox: the AGE-1 gene found in nature was the one that gave the worm a short life span. It was the "defective" gene that caused the worm to live longer. AGE-1 looked not like a selfish gene but an aging gene. It was just the kind of gene that natural selection ought to eliminate handily. How had this gene survived, and what was it doing in the worm genome?
AGE-1 was only the first case of an aging gene in worms. There are now hundreds of genes known that lengthen life span when they are deleted. In other words, these genes, when present, have the effect of shortening life span. Some of them tend to improve fertility; some don't. Some have other beneficial side effects, but about half the known life-shortening genes offer nothing in return, or at least nothing that has yet been identified. This is direct evidence in favor of answer number three, the answer that defies conventional evolutionary theory.
Aging genes have been discovered in other lab animals as well as worms. The other pop lar species for aging scientists to study have been yeast cells, fruit flies, and mice. These four species come from very different branches of the evolutionary tree. Nonetheless, they share common ancestors, going back hundreds of millions of years ago to the first eukaryotes (complex cells with nuclei and certain other organelles). You and I and the mouse and the worm and the fly and the yeast cell are all eukaryotes, and there are some genes--including deleterious ones--that we share. Why? Why has nature conserved life- shortening, "killer" genes?
The answer must reflect the unity of life. There are certain core functions of the cell that arose in the distant past and have been conserved through aeons of evolution. We all transcribe our genes into proteins using the same gene tic code, we all burn sugar for energy using the Krebs cycle, and we all reproduce sexually using a style of cell combination and division known as meiosis. We all age and die.
It is remarkable that aging is one of these core life functions that almost all eukaryotes share. There are genes that modulate aging in yeast cells that are close cousins of aging genes in worms, in flies, and in mammals, including you and me. Despite the fact that aging is a disaster for the individual, evolution seems to have guarded and preserved the genes for aging as though they were the crown jewels. This is a dead giveaway that aging must have an essential biological function.
Patrician Genes
There is a natural analogy between population cycles in ecology and the economic cycles of boom and bust that appear in the brand of capitalism embraced by America and the West.
In the wake of the 1929 economic collapse, the Roosevelt administration was able to pass a broad program of government oversight and regulation of business practices. There followed forty years of unprecedented growth and the rise of an American middle class, the first time in history that any economic system had supported a majority of its citizens in comfort and security. But in 1980 began the Reagan backlash, deregulation, and the return of unbridled economic competition. Capitalism became predatory, the middle class began to shrink, business cycles deepened, and a growing rift now separates a wealthy elite from the struggling majority. There have been three major stock market crashes in the thirty years since deregulation, each followed by painful unemployment and economic stagnation.
Without regulation, competition becomes destructive. The idea that stability and a broad prosperity can emerge from pure competition is thoroughly discredited in practice, but it is a useful myth for the 1 percent who profit mightily when there are no rules and no regulators. If they told the truth about their motives, the rapacious corporate giants could never sell deregulation to an enlightened democracy. So they promote the dogma of a " free market," not because they believe in this or any ideology but because it supports the freedom of the largest and the strongest to pillage everyone else.
Historically, an important part of the argument for the benignity of free markets comes from the analogy with evolution. (Just look at the marvels nature hath wrought using only the chisel of bare- knuckled competition!) This is social Darwinism, the doctrine that the rich and successful not only contribute more to society than you and I but that they have better genes to boot. It is a perversion of Darwin's ideas, but from the very beginning, his sound biological theory has been linked to an elitist social ideology. During the early years of the twentieth century, social Darwinism played a crucial role in shaping the version of evolutionary theory that emerged and predominates to this day.
People are rich and powerful because their parents were rich and powerful -- nothing remotely fair or just about it. But social Darwinism promotes the fiction that there is a natural order in the predominance of an elite hereditary class. Like the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith a century earlier, Darwin's "struggle for existence" has been caricatured to support the myth that pure, unrestrained competition can be magically transmuted into a harmonious society. The truth is that "tooth and claw" competition doesn't work in economics, and it doesn't work in ecology. Competition is vital, but it must be regulated, or it poses a fatal risk of instability for the whole system.
Darwin himself was of the British aristocracy, and he had some trouble acknowledging the huge evolutionary significance of cooperation. Yet in his later work The Descent of Man, Darwin spoke explicitly of a group that could have an evolutionary advantage distinct from the sum of its individuals.
By the mid-twentieth century, the existence of cooperation was denied utterly by the mainstream of evolutionary theory. We live now in an age of hyperindividualism, and it is no accident that, in our culture, the dominant version of Darwin's theory is based on pure selfishness.
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