Extinction Isn’t an End: Mining Ancient Innovation for Future Solutions

The study of biology has yielded incalculable human riches: We selectively breed animals and plants, we avert apocalyptic pandemics and ecosystem collapses, we forecast debilitating illnesses, we prolong our lifespans, and in some cases, we understand and control our own bodies down to the level of individual bits of our DNA. All of this is made possible by understanding our links to the organisms that surround, and inhabit, us.

In the context of this bounty of biological knowledge, where does the past — the study of our earliest ancestors — fit in? I’m not talking about our hominid cousins or even our cute distant kin, the social media-friendly warm-blooded mammals. I’m referring to the microorganisms that lived billions of years ago on the early Earth. These organisms are difficult to distinguish by the human eye, they barely resemble us, and, as Douglas Adams ( The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ) once wrote, “Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.” So why concern ourselves with the anatomy, physiology, and molecular biology of organisms that lived billions of years ago — presumably including many lineages that have long since perished — pruned away by the ferocity of fate and circumstance?

Evolution’s deepest illusion is the teleological impression it creates upon our minds. The classic “March of Progress” chart depicting a gradual change from ancestral primate to Homo sapiens is indelibly baked into the human psyche. But the truth of evolution is far more complicated, surprising, and beautiful: Most species that have ever lived have gone extinct, and many of these extinctions occurred through no fault of their own. They were quite fit to reproduce, but natural fluctuations or catastrophes occurred and ran them off the board. Among all populations of organisms that live at any given moment, almost none of them are part of a lineage that actually becomes measurably more complex within an observable number of generations. Why? Because there are many costs, and few benefits, to complexification in the short term — any additional feature is also something that can go wrong, and there are always far more ways to go wrong than to improve.

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