Mutants: More Than Just a Failed Experiment
The implications of the organism-environment relationship in genetic medicine and space exploration
Take a moment to look at the succulent pictured above. Now, look at your man. Now, back to the plant. Internalize the fact that the only things separating your man from that plant are roughly 3 billion years of compounded coincidence and an Amazon Prime membership. Your man shares a common ancestor with this plant, along with every other living thing on the planet.
Those coincidences, which some people like to call mutants, almost always result in a failure to survive. However; since you’re reading this article and not sitting in a pot of soil (I assume), there is evidence that mutants occasionally result in a novel advantage. This is the way we’ve thought about evolution for over hundred years now, but what about all of those “failed experiments”? Do unsuccessful mutants have any additional insights to offer us, or should we write them off as just that: failed experiments?
A lack of fitness is defined by the relative mismatch between organism and environment. Every organism is perfectly adapted for survival in some environment.
Charles Darwin called them “monstrosities” in On The Origin of Species. Monstrosity: something that is outrageously or offensively wrong. Ouch. The context of Darwin’s life likely influenced the way he viewed genetic variants. To a 19th century pigeon breeder, any pigeon that doesn’t look like its siblings sticks out like a sore thumb. Yet Darwin knew that these monstrosities were key in the emergence of new species. What he didn’t explore in great detail were those monstrosities that never went on to pass their genes to future generations.
In Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book The Gene: An Intimate History (2016) one very important theme emerges: a lack of fitness is defined by the relative mismatch between organism and environment. Every organism is perfectly adapted for survival in some environment. Unsuccessful mutants aren’t so much failures, but perfectly adapted to thrive in some environment other than the one in which they currently find themselves.
If a man’s severe autism doesn’t afford him the ability to navigate social interactions — but at the same time greatly enhances his abilities as a world-class musician—he would thrive best in an environment that values creative skill over social competence.
What type of an environment would a person carrying the gene responsible for sickle-cell anemia be well suited to survive in? A malaria-rich environment is one answer. Many people currently find themselves in this situation. Those who live in malaria-affected regions have a dramatically decreased risk of contracting malaria if they are carriers of the sickle-cell anemia gene. This is an example of a happy coincidence, where organism happens to match quite nicely with environment.
We have historically been too concerned with restoring the afflicted to a state of normalcy by our standards. We haven’t, until recently, concerned ourselves with nurturing the organism-environment relationship.
Things get much more difficult as you enter the realm of genetic disease, particularly self-destructive diseases like cancer, but it is still useful to keep in mind that every organism has an ideal environment in which it is best equipped to survive. This has enormous implications for how we approach the treatment of genetic disorders.
We, as humans, have a very bad track record when it comes to treating genetic disorders. The story of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Erb’s palsy, though not genetic in nature, illustrates well our attitude toward those who break from our traditional views of normalcy. Due to complications during his breech birth, several nerves in Wilhelm’s neck were severely damaged, leaving him with a withered left arm. His family was so obsessed with returning the arm to normalcy that they strapped his right arm to his body, forcing him to exercise his paralyzed arm. This had a detrimental effect on his emotional development, and it could have been prevented by a different healing philosophy.
“A mutation is a statistical entity, not a pathological or moral one. A mutation doesn’t imply disease, nor does it specify a gain or loss of function. In a formal sense, a mutation is defined only by its deviation from the norm. By itself, then, a mutant, or a mutation, can provide no real information about a disease or disorder. The definition of disease rests, rather, on the specific disability caused by an incongruity between an individual’s genetic endowment and his or her current environment — between a mutation, the circumstances of a person’s existence, and his or her goals for survival or success. It is not mutation that ultimately causes disease, but mismatch.” — Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History (2016)
We have historically been too concerned with restoring the afflicted to a state of normalcy by our standards. We haven’t, until recently, concerned ourselves with nurturing the organism-environment relationship. We need to tug first on the environment side of the relationship until we match it to the organism. If a perfect match isn’t possible by environmental changes alone, only then do we tug on the organism.
The treatment of hypochondroplasia (a form of dwarfism) has, in recent years, shifted its focus from the restoration of normalcy to the restoration of function. A common side effect of this condition is spinal stenosis, where the affected experiences pain or weakness in the spinal cord or limbs due to abnormal narrowing of the spinal canal. Spinal stenosis likely wouldn’t be a problem for a person living in zero gravity, but life on Earth makes intervention necessary. A laminectomy is a common interventional surgery used to remedy the symptoms of spinal stenosis.
This treatment is primarily focused on the disability presented by hypochondroplasia, rather than the abnormality. When physicians lose sight of this important distinction they begin to wander into dangerous territory, such as controversial bone-lengthening surgery. People who undergo these types of interventions, that focus more on treating abnormality than disability, typically see a significant decrease in function and quality of life.
The genetic variation of life on earth is very nearly infinite. Life will never run out of ways to order and reorder the genetic code. That means that the number of environments life can inhabit is very nearly infinite. Given the 4 billion years since life started on earth, along with the near-infinite genetic possibilities, it’s likely that at least once an organism perfectly suited to thrive on the surface of Mars was born. That organism almost certainly died shortly after birth. That organism would conventionally be described as a failure by Earth life standards. However; if we held all life on Earth to Mars life standards, we would all be considered failed experiments.
When we eventually venture out to Mars to establish colonies, we will have to decide which genetic variants of crops and livestock to bring with us. For the first time in our history we will select for mutants that aren’t the best equipped to survive on earth. It’s an important paradigm shift from trait-based selection to environment-based selection. We will suddenly become less interested in how red this apple is and immensely more interested in what type of environment this organism is best adapted to. For the first time in Earth life’s history the “unsuccessful” mutants will dominate.
Even in the artificial environments of our martian colonies we will find ourselves in vastly different living conditions than we are used to. Our settlements will likely have to be buried under mounds of dry ice and dirt to shield ourselves from the incident solar radiation. The first humans on Mars will probably never go outside. There are likely people on Earth right now that are best suited to thrive in an environment similar to this. Among those first humans that colonize the Red Planet the most successful will be the ones with the lowest biological opportunity cost of living in a martian settlement.
Our idea of what a thoroughly terraformed Mars looks like is often made with the assumption that we will pull much harder on the environment side than on the organism side. We want a Mars where life behaves exactly like it does on Earth. This; however, is an unlikely future reality. Biology is quite a bit more plastic than geology.
Those who study exoplanets often have to ask themselves: Does this planet sustain life? This question is then followed by another. Could Earth life survive on this planet? The question now becomes too limiting. Earth life is a biased sample. Every time Earth life has produced something not perfectly suited to survive on Earth it is out-competed, out-selected, and removed from the sample. The question we must now ask, when confronted with a new planet or environment, is: could Earth life produce something that could survive there? The difference is profound. We are no longer limited to what Earth has historically allowed, but rather the known limits of biochemistry.
The difference between successful and unsuccessful mutants is not the degree of genetic defectiveness, but the result of an environmental compatibility. The success of an organism depends, quite literally, on where you stand.
