That's the title of my upcoming (February 9, 2006) Chautauqua series lecture at Eastern Kentucky University. I find it oddly fitting that my lecture in the series should fall between the presentations of Angela Davis, the 60's radical, and Massimo Pigliucci, a wonderfully insightful evolutionary biologist whom I debated a few years ago. Massimo, as I discovered in a long conversation at a private reception following our debate, is just the sort of evolutionary biologist who would enjoy my talk. In a review published last year in Nature (June 5, 2005), Massimo observed that "the clamour to revise neo-darwinism is becoming so loud that hopefully most practising evolutionary biologists will begin to pay attention."
Massimo was talking about long-standing problems with understanding the mechanism of evolution (and the promise of revisting heretical ideas such as seemingly Lamarckian modes of inheritance), but his statement applies with equal force to the ongoing ferment about which geometry or topology best describes the history of life on Earth. An increasing number of biologists who work on the early branches of the Tree of Life have begun to say that there never was a single Tree, rooted in a single common ancestor. In a recent publication, Carl Woese (for instance) argued that "the Doctrine of Common Descent has deceived us" -- the capital letters are his.
Reaction to this dissent has tended to minimize its significance. One root, three roots -- what does it matter? In my talk, I'll explore the radical import of cutting through the trunk of the Tree of Life near its base. Run a chain saw through a real tree near its root, and everyone knows what will happen. The extension of the metaphor to the biological Tree of Life is apt: Once the tree begins to come apart at its base, it is hard -- maybe impossible -- to stop the ramifying consequences.
So that's what I'll discuss, in as much detail as the organizers will allow, next week at EKU. Come by and say hello if you're within reasonable driving distance.
