Put another way, you are running a metabolism that is powering protein production, with the ultimate goal of making chromosomes to pass on to the next generation. Life took about 4 billion years to come up with you and me, and over those 4 billion years the most complicated life forms have progressively got ever more complex. Molecular structures have become more diverse and complicated, some cells have also become increasingly more structured, and cells have evolved to work together to produce structures such as bones, kidneys, tree trunks and fungal bodies. Life builds structures from proteins to brains that are sufficiently resilient that they can last a lifetime.
More complex structures required larger and more complex genomes. The self-assembly manuals acquired new genes, new switches, and the bodies that carried the genes got new cell types. I find it remarkable that evolution has self-assembled a self-assembly manual to produce intelligent organisms that have the wherewithal to understand not only what self-assembly manuals are, but also how they might have come about. This knowledge, which is uncontentious in the scientific community, has been arrived at via the application of the scientific method. When I briefly summarize the state of scientific knowledge, as I do throughout this book, I am not giving credit to the enormous effort that has been expended by scientists to gain insight. Thousands of scientists have taken observations, posed hypotheses, designed experiments to test them, analysed data and rerun experiments conducted by other scientists to make sure their findings can be replicated. The business of conducting science is time-consuming, and the generation of new knowledge is often stressful and challenging. Scientists are as human as everyone else, and the scientific endeavour is as frustrating as any other aspect of life. Key to conducting science is communicating about the work you have done, what you have found out, and how it might advance understanding. Before I turn to how life got started and began its journey to complex beings like you and me, I will briefly explain how scientists communicate their work, and how scientific consensus emerges. This will help explain why the astonishing complexity I describe above is accepted scientific knowledge.
Part of being a scientist is being able to effectively communicate. As a practising scientist I need to convince my peers that the novel research I do is robust. Scientists apply the scientific method to test a hypothesis, and then they need to tell other scientists about it. They do this through scientific papers that are written in a very formulaic manner. If you ever suffer from insomnia, go to Google Scholar, type in a scientific term or two and read the papers that are returned. You will come across dry prose such as:
We derive an equation to exactly decompose change in the mean value of a phenotypic trait into contributions from fluctuations in the demographic structure and age-specific viability selection, fertility selection, phenotypic plasticity, and differences between offspring and parental trait values. We treat fitness as a sum of its components rather than as a scalar and explicitly consider age structure by focusing on short time steps, which are appropriate for describing phenotypic change in species with overlapping generations.
This is from one of my more accessible papers. No wonder many non-scientists are put off by science.
When a piece of research is completed, it is written up and submitted to a scientific journal, where it is assessed for publication. An editor at the journal will initially read the submitted manuscript, and if he or she feels it might be well aligned with the journal’s objectives, it will be sent for in-depth peer review. Between one and ten experts will then review the paper, sending their critiques back to the editor. The role of the reviewer is to comment on how novel the work is, report any flaws in the collection of data, experimental design, statistical analysis or modelling, flag any relevant literature that has not been cited and highlight any parts of the writing that are unclear. Their ultimate aim is to help improve the science, although some reviewers occasionally go further, choosing to humiliate authors in an attempt to destroy their confidence and possibly their careers. Mercifully, most reviewers are much more professional than this, providing helpful comments, although in my fifteen years of editing two of the leading journals in my field I have read a dozen or so staggeringly aggressive and unnecessarily hostile reviews. I would always rescind such reviews and strike the offending academic from the database of prospective reviewers. As reviewing is usually provided as an unpaid service, this is not a particularly harsh punishment, so I always hoped the anger the reviewer would doubtless feel when the paper was published would act as some form of reprimand for their deeply unprofessional behaviour.
Once a paper is published, other scientists will attempt to replicate results independently, particularly if the results are surprising or challenge accepted wisdom. If results can be repeatedly replicated, then the weight of evidence in support of the findings increases, eventually becoming accepted by the scientific community. Darwin’s theory of evolution was contentious when published, despite Darwin’s diligence in compiling large amounts of supporting evidence. In the 165 years since On the Origin of Species was published, biologists have worked out how to measure evolution, have developed models to predict it, and have studied it in laboratory and field experiments. They have collated vast quantities of evidence in support of evolution by natural selection. It is as real as gravity and electromagnetism. Scientists have repeatedly challenged the theory and, like Einstein’s theory of general relativity, it has successfully withstood these challenges. Science progresses knowledge because the scientific method is concerned with challenge and replication, and together these make powerful bedfellows. Incorrect hypotheses and ideas are weeded out, with correct ones being supported with ever-increasing amounts of evidence until, like gravity and evolution, they become fact.
Scientific writing is dry, exact and formulaic, with some reviewers acting as the fun police, stripping papers of anything that could draw a smile. I have even had the acknowledgements section of one manuscript edited to remove thanks to colleagues for uninformed debate. I was trying to be funny, but the thanks were heartfelt, as the hours spent discussing the work with colleagues with expertise in other areas helped me identify which parts of the problem were hard to grasp by the non-specialist. Nonetheless, the occasional author sneaks wit past humourless reviewers and editors. One of my favourites is a 1974 publication in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. Dennis Upper’s publication ‘The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of “Writer’s Block” ’ is nothing more than a blank page. A footnote by reviewer A in part states:
I have studied this manuscript very carefully with lemon juice and X-rays and have not detected a single flaw in either design or writing style. I suggest it be published without revision. Clearly it is the most concise manuscript I have ever seen – yet it contains sufficient detail to allow other investigators to replicate Dr Upper’s failure.
Papers have become the currency of science, with the mantra ‘publish or perish’ being used increasingly over the last two decades. The large numbers of applications for some jobs – sometimes many hundreds for a single position – mean busy members of appointment panels produce lists of competitive applicants by looking at publication records rather than by reading the papers, and in response to this early-career researchers seeking a faculty position in a university rush to publish. Over the years, many of my graduate students have asked me how many papers they need to publish to get an academic position. Coupled with this, in the UK, the government determines funding to departments and universities by an assessment exercise based partly on publication outputs. With the public rightly demanding that their taxes be appropriately spent, governments wanted a way to justify how higher education funding was spent. Papers provide a simple metric. The problem with the papers-as-currency landscape is that good science often takes time, and this means that many papers published today say little. In addition, many of the top journals in the field, where scientists like to publish, favour papers reporting exciting new results rather than replicating existing ones. Scientific culture, at least in my field in the UK, means that the scientific method is not being used as effectively as it should be. Funding needs to be available for studies to attempt to replicate published results, and the best journals should publish results from such studies. The focus on papers is sensible, but it does mean that books count for little in the government assessment of university performance or in the scientific job market, and writing books has become a lost art in many university science departments.