A few scientists are suggesting a radical, unprecedented, new tool to save the world’s coral reefs. They are talking about altering the genetic make-up of wild organisms. In a smart effort to avoid past associations of genetic modification, this activity has been given the benign-sounding title “assisted evolution.” They think it may be possible to create corals that are more robust in the face of warming temperatures and to release these to intermingle and perhaps even replace the current weak corals that appear to be succumbing to climate change.
For scientists, evolution is the remarkably simply mechanism of creation which has, over billions of years, generated a complexity that is close to unfathomable. This diversity is celebrated in our litany of species: tens of millions, most still un-named, or known only by a few scant observations.
At finer scales evolution has generated the uncountable number of compounds and chemicals which act like a million precision lasers in an incredible edifice of objectives – from the cells, shells, skeletons and liquids which build us, through to compounds that serve us: poisons and cures, healing and cleaning agents, colours, structures, textures, light-modifying compounds, energy-generating systems, heating, cooling, light-harvesting, light emitting.
Evolution, too, has created the complexity of ecosystems, where species co-exist in a balance too complex to grasp, and indeed summing up to a planet that is somehow still self-sustaining, with just the right balance of emission and sequestration, biology combining with geology, chemistry, and meteorology to buffer and build the place we call home.
Into this walk a few experts who are just starting to understand a few of the genetic mechanisms and offer to assist. There’s an arrogance in choosing this word. I might assist an old man onto a bus, but the idea that anyone can assist evolution in some kind and benevolent way is farcical. We can meddle, and we can certainly disrupt, but assist? I don’t think so.
Ten years ago we barely understood epigenetics. Five years ago, our only tools for genetic manipulation were crude beyond belief. Now we have one tool, the CRISPR/Cas9 system enabling us to modify genomes where we want. Strange chimeras are emerging, from the early efforts to insert fish genes into tomatoes, to the more recent mixing of pig and human genes. But this smacks of something closer to alchemy than the incredible artistry that has created the iridescent wing of a tropical butterfly, or the fine-tuned partnership between a clownfish and an anemone.
My point is not that we should call a halt to all this. The science should continue – though personally I’d like to see stronger ethical regulations set by people other than the scientists doing the work – and the debate should begin in earnest about whether, when, and how we might disrupt the genetics of the natural world.
In that debate, we shouldn’t forget the promises of those who first tried simple efforts to control nature by “assisting”: the introduction of prey species such as cats, foxes, weasels, and cane toads, which went on to devastate entire continents. Nor should we forget those who promised that GM crops wouldn’t escape into the natural world. They did and those same genes crossed species boundaries as well as field boundaries.
But we have begun to push the planet to a point of no return and most humans, constrained by the narrow confines of a life set by evolution, can’t grasp the enormity of changes we are setting in train. Changes that will see temperatures warming and seas rising for decades or centuries after our death. Physical disruptions to lands and sea-beds; chemical changes to oceans and atmosphere. We are in a situation where, maybe, we are like the astronauts on Apollo 13 and we need to try and build a solution with the very crude tools we currently have at our disposal. But we should also be aware that this is a little like asking a 3-year-old to defend his house with a gun. We will shoot wildly. It may go wrong.
I just got back from the coral reefs of the British Indian Ocean Territory. Corals that, last year, were all dead. This year almost everywhere there were faint signs of recovery – new corals, of numerous species, battered survivors starting to regrow over their own dead skeletons. There was a strong sense of hope, but of course the great likelihood is that there’ll be another warm year in the next three to four years.
Will that simply kill everything again, or will the new corals be a little stronger? Evolution is going on every day in every one of trillions of corals world-wide. It is not always a fast process, but I still wonder if there may be things we haven’t thought of. Is it really possible that a few scientists in Hawaii and Australia working on a few individuals of a few species can operate faster and more effectively than this vast natural experiment? Maybe, but I’m not convinced yet. I for one am far from ready for the irreversible experiment that sees us putting crudely modified corals out to breed in the oceans.
