Princeton University recently offered a glowing profile of their maverick developmental biologist Celeste Nelson. The piece talks about how her lab is, atypically, not simply composed of biologists but contains researchers from wildly different fields — engineering, physics — working together to study lung development. It turns out they are getting results by not knowing what “everyone knows” in biology. 

Nelson says: 

What I like about putting them all together in one lab is that they start to question each other’s assumptions. Everyone comes in with a certain level of ignorance, and that ignorance is a massive superpower, because they don’t know what the dogmas are. Just about all our major findings have come from being completely ignorant about how biology is supposed to work, and actually seeing the system with fresh eyes.

So what are these burdensome assumptions? The example the piece gives as an illustration is, interestingly, an evolutionary assumption: 

Within the biology community, for instance, it’s traditionally been assumed that conserved traits — those shared by different species and selected by evolution on multiple occasions — are inherently important, while nature’s outliers are less worthy of study. Because many in Nelson’s group were trained outside the world of biology, they’re not beholden to its assumptions and have no issue prioritizing the study of unconserved traits, like mechanisms of lung development. 

Of course, if you believed that all biological systems were built with care by a designer, you wouldn’t assume that less-common designs were most likely inferior or worthless evolutionary dead-ends. I have no reason to think that Nelson supports intelligent design or that she is in any way a critic of contemporary evolutionary theory. But as you read her profile, you begin to get the uneasy feeling that it’s not just ignorance in general that is a superpower in her lab, but more particularly ignorance of evolutionary theory. 

The example above is only the beginning. In one short article (which seems in no way intended as a critique of evolutionary theory) I can see about five other examples of the superpower of evolutionary ignorance at play.  

1. Homology vs. Unique Design

Early in her career, Nelson tried to publish a paper on chicken lung development. The reviewers were not very interested in her findings, because scientists had found similar results about mouse lungs, and “the conventional wisdom at the time said that chicken lungs form and behave like mouse and human lungs.” 

This response made her question if the lungs of different species really were so similar, or if that was merely an assumption. 

She started looking into it, and found that lungs actually develop by significantly different processes in different related species. Homology was only assumed — it wasn’t the reality. How often might that be the case? 

2. Reductionism vs. Holism 

Nelson was able to uncover these differences in the lungs of different species by setting aside the genes and proteins — which are so often the focus — and actually studying the developing lungs themselves. 

There has long been a tendency to reduce an entire living organism to its genes. And no wonder; this approach is very comfortable for a Darwinian perspective, because random variation in genes seems relatively manageable for evolution — switch out a few letters, and voilà! you’ve got a new gene, perhaps a functional one. 

But this view of things doesn’t grasp the full scale of the organization and complexity of life. It’s becoming more and more apparent that the genetic code is only one factor that guides the development of organisms. Which was to be expected, in retrospect — living systems are obviously intricate in the extreme, and we never should have imagined that translating this intricacy into code would somehow make it less complex. 

3. Going Solo vs Coordinated Action

One of the new discoveries Nelson’s lab has made is that smooth muscles guide lung development:

Nelson found that a type of stiff tissue called smooth muscle, which was previously assumed to lack a role in lung development, is critical for the formation of branches in mouse lungs… Using mouse cells that express fluorescent proteins, Nelson’s team created a time-lapse video that showed smooth muscle wrapping around the elongating bronchiole like a telephone cord, forcing the softer bronchiole to fork into two daughter branches that, fittingly, together resemble Mickey Mouse ears. This process occurs at the terminus of each growing branch, resulting in millions of such branching events over the course of lung development.

One part actively directing another part, with precision, is par for the course in engineering. And it is becoming increasingly apparent that it is also ubiquitous in biology. However, is it not what an evolutionary framework leads one to expect, because random beneficial mutations are not coordinated. Even if there is a viable evolutionary pathway to a complex system of interworking parts — with no step in the process lacking functionality for either the new structures or the organism as a whole, through some sort of “co-option” or “scaffolding” process — Darwinian mechanisms do not increase the likelihood of evolutionary development occurring according to this pathway, because the huge adaptive pay-off at the end of the process would not be foreknown and would therefore not itself be selected for. 

A large pile-up of individual useful traits is much more likely through Darwinian mechanisms than it would be by sheer luck, but a single useful trait that emerges only out of many traits working together is not.

4. Incremental Change vs. Synchronicity 

In fact, this is the very problem Nelson is currently working on — but from a developmental biology perspective, not an evolutionary biology perspective. (The change of subdisciplines apparently makes the problem suddenly relevant and worth discussing.) Nelson calls it the “Thanksgiving dinner problem.” The perennial difficulty of Thanksgiving dinners is that it’s hard to time everything just right so every dish finishes at the same time, and nothing gets cold. It’s the same problem in embryo development — if something gets “done” before everything else is done, the organism dies or is permanently impaired. That’s because all the parts are working together, and their coordination is what makes an organism function. 

When you think about it, it’s clear that problem applies to both development and evolution: a developing embryo can’t gain one organ without gaining another at the same time, or it doesn’t work — and the same goes for an evolving species. If five days of miscoordination in developmental history kills or impairs an individual organism, then of course 5 million years of miscoordination in evolutionary history wouldn’t work — since even one generation in this state would be an evolutionary dead end. 

In developmental biology, the solution is assumed to be some sort of underlying plan — biologists look for the signals, the code, written in the DNA or somewhere else, that must be directing the development. So the obvious question is, what’s guiding the timing of evolution?

5. Randomness vs. Engineering 

Richard Dawkins has said that biology is the study of natural systems that have the appearance of design. But many scientists seem to be overburdened by the length of this definition. It must be hard to always remember to add “the appearance of.” They perpetually revert to just saying “design.” 

So, not unexpectedly, the subtitle of the article lauds the “efficient designs” of various organisms that Nelson’s lab has uncovered. But this goes deeper than just semantics. If you think about Nelson’s research, most of her success comes from looking at life from an engineering perspective — even to the point of involving engineers in her lab. Whether she admits it or not, life is best understood through the framework of design. Might that be a hint about whether it might actually be designed?

All things considered, it looks like ignorance really is a superpower. No doubt that’s true in any area of expertise, since beginners can see things with fresh eyes. But I suspect it is especially true in the current field of evolutionary biology.