An apt description of how life works: Slop! Part II

In defense of our working description of life as slop, which we posted about yesterday, we suggest here a few principles that we believe apply to life at all levels, and along all time spans, from the immediate to the evolutionary.  The immediate, cellular, developmental level; the organismal level, including interacting organisms; and the evolutionary level, spanning eons.  Hence, the BlakePlock of our blog URL, and which we discuss at length in our book, Blake Plock.

Evolutionary biologists like laws, models, theorems or rules that explain biological observations and can be used to predict future observations.  Thus, Hamilton's Rule (which we blogged about a few days ago) which explains the perplexing (to a strict Darwinist) behavior of altruism, and which invokes the kinship assessing all-seeing eye of natural selection lest a simple act of kindness go by insufficiently rewarded by the beneficiary.  Likewise almost every trait of an organism from its color to its organ structures is given, or forced to have, a specific selectionistic explanation for its origin.  And of course the theory of natural selection has been used, refined and re-refined to explain all manner of traits and behaviors of individuals and even societies since Darwin's time.  But, despite their rigorous precision in principle, that resemble laws an Einstein would admire, none of these laws/models/rules can explain every instance of X, and often require some hand waving to apply at all.

We think this is because the most general rule, one that applies to all of life, is 'whatever works, works'.  That is, evolution follows no single rules.  As a result, life is a sloppy process, and when you think you've found a rule that works in one instance, life defies you to apply it again in another. It doesn't sound like proper science, but if the shoe fits.....

So, in writing our book and in other things we've written, we've come up with a list of general principles that we think apply very broadly, even given that life is a sloppy process, and even if the principles are very vague or generic by comparison with the formulas for chemical reactions or the action of gravity on the Moon.   And you don't have to take our word for it.  These general principles are used explicitly or implicitly every day in genetics and developmental biology laboratories around the world.  If you are a biologist, you will recognize right away that some or all of them guide your work, even if in an informal way.  We didn't invent these principles, we have simply compiled them -- and we discuss them at length in our book.

1. Inheritance with memory: life is one continuous history, from the beginning 4 billion years ago to now, and cells 'remember' what they've inherited and carry it forth (except for changes, such as mutations in DNA);

2. Modular organization; life is constructed in LEGO mode, with repeated units, like segments, hairs, leaves, and the like.  We have referred in earlier posts to the importance of polymers, long molecules made of different subunits (modular units), whose arrangement contains the 'information' of life.

3. Sequestration: the modules in life are isolated from each other, at least in part.  If life is a history of divergence from common origin, from the beginning, that was possible only because of local, isolated compartments that can be separated enough from other compartments to become different.  Parts of DNA are isolated from each other, cells are, organs are....and you are an organism all your own for the same reason.

4. Coding and interaction;  Life is organized as above, generally because of the signaling interactions among units within and between cells (and beyond).  The key to all of this is combinations of molecules present together in time and place within an organism.  Combinations represent one of many kinds of 'codes', of which the genetic code is only one example.  The dance of such interactions is what causes differential organisms.  

5: Contingency: what's here tomorrow works only from what's here today.  This is the hierarchical nature of combinatorial interactions that we mentioned yesterday.

6. Chance: action without direction.  It is fundamental to life that there is a major component of chance in most aspects of what happens.  Mutation in DNA or the chance transmission of variants from parent to offspring ('Mendel's rules'), and the chance aspects of birth and death, or of winning and losing competition (such as natural selection) are examples at various levels. 

7. Adaptability in the face of changing circumstances.  DNA reacts to its environment (genes are used, or not, depending on whether the DNA is grabbed near them by proteins or other molecules), cells react to conditions via signals of various sorts that they are primed to detect, and so on, up to you, who react to your environment and decide what to eat, when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em, who to woo and who to fear, and so many other things.  Your brain is a hyperactive environment-sensor and decision-maker, and we're all familiar with that (and why some of our closest friends can't ever seem to make up their minds!).  But every cell in your body is doing it all the time, and so are structures within them.

8. Cooperation.  The above phenomena are, as we use the term, examples of cooperation, that is, co-operation, working jointly together.  Sometimes, as among social organisms, this is the kind of socially supportive interactions we usually use the word 'cooperation' for, but the myriad interactions that involve multiple partners (signal, signal detector, cells in organs, and so on) are examples of cooperation in the mechanical and more literal, rather than emotional sense of the term.

Not the least aspect of life that is very general is the lack of precision in these general principles of life:  no matter what might be 'read' in the genes, development makes mistakes -- DNA gets wrongly copied during cell replication, e.g, or during gene expression, or a gene is expressed at the wrong time or place ('wrong' according to what we think are the rules; e.g., A's always pair with T's, and G's with C's in nucleic acids, or this gene is 'for' that, and only expressed here, or there's only one way to build a given trait).  From cell to cell there is variation if you look closely, and the only reason we tend to overlook that variation is what can be called the central tendency, of many cells of a given type, no matter that they vary, together generally produce an acceptable structure (or the individual dies aborning).

Work-arounds have evolved for some of these 'mistakes' -- some DNA copying mistakes are repaired, but not all by any means, which is a good thing for biodiversity.  But others, that aren't repaired, are either fatal to an embryo or survivable, and of the survivable ones, eventually they can even come to look like good ideas; another good thing for biodiversity.  Or, an embryo can survive the mistake, but that same mistake might well spell doom later on, in an unforgiving environment.

These principles provide a logic to explain why traits have come about.  Yes, you might say wings are naturally selected, and maybe they are (that is, proto-birds had more offspring than animals that weren't airborne at all, and so wings got trendy), but that doesn't tell you anything about how wings came about.  And anyway, maybe wings weren't advantageous at all, they just happened, so your theory of natural selection tells you nothing at all about wings in the end.

Now none of these generalizations are secret or unknown, they are as simple as can be, and they're rather obvious.  There's so much to say about them to show the point that one could, well, write a whole book on the subject.  That's what we did, but even the fact that these general ideas are all around us and easy to perceive, people persist in pushing hard for very precise and rigorous 'laws' that it is almost just as easy to show don't work that way.  We are too wedded to that kind of Galileo/Newton/Einstein science, for historical if not other reasons.

Tomorrow we will take this kind of slopistry from a somewhat different perspective.....

An apt description for how life works is: Slop! Part I

From Darwin's time to the present, theories advanced to explain the nature and evolution of life have generally attempted something that is law-like, precise, mathematical, and universal.  But they all have essentially failed--not as apt descriptions of aspects of life or instances of evolution, but as generalizations with the kind of precision expected of 'science'.

Genetics, being molecular, strikes many as the underlying domain where the precise laws of life occur.  If molecules and energy are the fundamental constituents of all of existence, then this must be so about life as well.  It seems to many to be a reasonable deduction that whole organisms must therefore be complex embodiments of the diktats of their genomes.  What is written in the DNA is often treated, even despite some casual caveats to the contrary, as written in stone: your fixed destiny!

But upon close examination this is just not how things generally are.  The causal aspects of life comprise a spectrum, a panorama ranging from very strong causation that largely fits the dreams of simple theoretical biology, to a large amount (we would say certainly the majority) of causation that is aggregative, cooperative, weak, statistical and hence probabilistic, and for which we do not have rigorous theory of the kind that chemists do.

In fact, since life began just as some sort of bubbling chemical reaction in the primeval 'soup', it has become 'life' rather than just a chemical reaction, because it developed sequestered regions (that eventually became cells, organs, organisms, and species) that internally had various interactions but became both isolated and different from other such regions.  The patterns of difference were generated by the evolutionary processes whose key characteristics include that it has no plan, and no pre-set direction.  There is no theory for what will evolve, only some generic processes.

At the level of individual molecules, molecule A interacts with molecule B just as is taught in chemistry class.  There is no violation, that we know of, of the laws of chemistry just because the molecules are found in a living cell.  Molecules are molecules.  The same individual biochemical reactions can in fact be produced in the proverbial test tube, and those of us in life science research achieve such miracles routinely every day.  But there are so many different types of molecules, at different concentrations, times, and locations even within a single cell, that the net results are not so simple.  They don't just add up like the sums of the prices on your grocery list.

For one thing, there are always chance aspects to whether two molecules will bump into each other or interact (as taught in chem class).   But things are not uniformly distributed even within a cell, the way they are in class.  Unlike a soup, there's nobody to stir them to make them mix evenly.  Life is in a sense about not mixing evenly.  So a very large number of probabilistic aspects of chemistry are relevant to the net result.

The overall result is different from a simple sloshing solution for very key reasons that go beyond just differences in concentration of ingredients.  This is that living reactions are hierarchical: what happens now depends on what happened just before, which depends on what happened just before that, in a chain that goes back 3.8 billion years of continuous contingencies!  Some individual reactions are, again as they teach in chem class, reversible.  But the hierarchy from conception to death, or differentiation of cells from one state to the next, is typically not reversible (for example, making stem cells from other types of cells is a form of such reversal, but engineered from the outside, not by the cell itself).

Any major biological function is a mix of such hierarchies with their own complexities, time relationships, and contingencies.  In some situations there are ways of going back, but in many this is not the case.  In particular, it's generally not the case with evolution: commitments get made, hierarchies get established, and they are too interwoven for Nature to do much backpedaling.  But the origin of these complex, hierarchical wefts and warps was haphazard in that, unlike a human weaver, it had no pattern or future use in mind (it had no mind!).  Hierarchies build up over time, that become too complex to be viable if they were to 'try' to reverse course.

Then why do things seem so orderly -- so tempting to develop nice, neat equations for life the way Einstein had a ridiculously simple equation for the entire universe (e=mc^2)?  Or the simple formula for water (H2O), so simple that we can tell where in the vastness of space water may exist just by knowing the formula?  The reason, in a phrase, is that while life is sloppy in the above ways, it is divided into units with enough members, and the members are closely related enough, that there are what can be called 'central tendencies'.  Individuals who are each a mix of huge numbers of components, like molecules of a certain kind, or copies of a protein coded by some gene, each variable but only up to an extent, can themselves vary among each other, but only up to an extent.  Humans vary, but not enough to ever be confused with rabbits.  Body temperature varies but only within a recognizable mammalian range (and when too far off, we can understand why it is a 'disease').

So, orderly slop is the order of the day for much of life.  The orderliness is rather loose, not at all like the orderliness of water molecules, the speed of light, or the pull of gravity.  It follows general principles generally, and at various levels follows basic physical and chemical principles rigidly.  But life is an evolutionary phenomenon based on divergence and difference.  It is not like a crystal that may grow, but only within very constrained bounds.

This is why, unsatisfying as it may seem to someone suffering from physics envy, the laws of life are frustratingly elusive--even if there are such 'laws'.  And yet, if one stops expecting and starts understanding, life is very orderly and understandable, taken on its own terms.  That's what makes it life!

What one would expect, and what one sees very clearly, is that the soup became slop:  very organized in some ways, wholly consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry, but not orderly and rule-following in the way of the physical sciences.  Tomorrow we'll offer some general principles, that we think go a long way toward explaining -- and predicting -- the orderliness as well as the slop in life.

45th Carnival of Evolution

The 45th CoE is up, on the blog of an insect photographer.  You should take a look because it's beautifully presented, if for nothing else.   And there's plenty else.

Altruism -- can we do good just for the sake of it, after all?

Ant colony; Wikimedia Commons

Altruism, organisms being good to others even at their own risk, has perplexed true Darwinists for 150 years.  It even perplexed Darwin, who brilliantly anticipated numerous potential challenges to his theory, including the possibility that the existence of altruism, in a world he painted as red in tooth and claw, could destroy it.

The March 5 issue of The New Yorker addresses the issue in a piece (subscription required) by Jonah Lehrer, "Kin and Kind."

According to legend, the biologist J.B.S. Haldane was several pints into the evening when he was asked how far he would go to save the life of another person.  Haldane thought of a moment, and then started scribbling on the back of a napkin.  "I would would jump into a river to save eight cousins, but not seven."  His drunken answer summarized a powerful scientific idea.  Because individuals share much of their genome with close relatives, a trait will also persist if it leads to the survival of their kin.  According to Haldane's moral arithmetic, making a sacrifice for a family member is just another way of promoting our own DNA.

That settled it.  Altruism is selfish after all.  Evolutionary biologist, William Hamilton, formalized the idea in an equation published in 1975, in what came to be called inclusive fitness:

      rb > c

where

      r is "degree of relatedness",
      b is the reproductive benefit to the recipient of the altruistic behavior, and
      c is the reproductive cost to the altruist.

In very basic terms, you and your sib, parent, or child share half your genes.  This is on average and it's statistical.  You can't say in advance which genetic variants you'll share, just that overall it'll be half of them.  That's because everyone gets half their genes from their father, half from their mother.   So, if you do something for your sib that puts you at risk, say, of having one of your own children, but your assistance leads your sib to have at least 2 children s/he that wouldn't have had without your help, then the genetic variants you carry will, on average, proliferate--via your sib's children who will carry those variants.

Under these conditions, if a variant in question leads you to this helpful rescuing behavior, the variant will (statistically) proliferate, because helping your sib to have more children than you give up will increase the frequency of those helping-variants in the next generation.  Likewise, you share 1/8 of your variants with your cousins, so to give up a child of your own by helping your cousin, that cousin would have to have at least 8 more children than without your help.  That's what Haldane meant.  This may make little sense in slow reproducers like humans, but could actually work, in principle at least, in fast reproducers who produce hundreds or thousands of offspring--like ants.

So, Hamilton's rule seemed to explain why vampire bats feed each other, why bees will sting, and die, to defend the hive, and why Ken dove into a pool to save a drowning stranger years ago.  It even came to explain things that had nothing to do with altruism, such as homosexuality, which could evolve because homosexuals cared for the offspring of their kin, thus perpetuating their own genes even if they themselves didn't reproduce.

This would seem to show clearly that, by itself, Hamilton's rule simply cannot explain human (or even primate) sociality.  In all human societies people routinely help their cousins and other more lineally distant relatives.  But primates simply cannot have 8 or more additional children as a result of being helped.  So those who have thought about this have had to devise various escape-value explanations to preserve the essence of Hamilton's rule; one is 'generalized reciprocity' the idea that I may help you because some day you may return the favor.  But with such escape valves, and the complexity of society, it should long ago have been clear that all bets are off.

And, the entomologist, E.O. Wilson, became enchanted with the idea, and used it to explain ant behavior, as well as human, in his book that got Sociobiology -- the idea, essentially, that behavior can be explained genetically -- up and running. His last chapter, which anthropologists knew at the time was very ill-advised if not downright naive, applied all of this to humans, in very superficial ways.  But he started a fad -- or ideology, or even a cult of sociobiology that was nowhere so fervently applied as it was to humans.

But now Wilson has changed his mind, and thinks inclusive fitness doesn't explain altruism, or much else, after all.  And this is making a big splash in the field of evolutionary biology and even in the popular press, as the Lehrer piece shows. This is part of the cult of the celebrity science, and the good fodder it makes for the popular media.  It's interesting that we were supposed to believe Wilson when he was a Hamilton devoté, and now again when he's decidedly not.  It's like Francis Fukuyama, who wrote The End of History in 1992, arguing that liberal democracies were the final stage in the development of governmental form, and then changed his mind.  He was also a leading neocon, until he wasn't.  And he's still a media darling.  Why do those who were anointed shepherd remain shepherds forever, no matter what they do to destroy their own credibility, and the rest of us are sheep forever?

In any case, the signal, and among the strongest, theoretical examples of the way that what appears to be nice can be shown to be calculatedly nasty,  that was the particular genetic relationships among the different classes of members of a hive in many ant species, simply isn't right.  It doesn't explain what it was held, fervidly and combatively, to show.

Haplodiploidy in bees; Encycl. Britannica

In the supposed canonical case of ants, this had to do with what is called 'haplodiploidy', too much to go into here unless we're requested to do that, but can easily be found in sources like Wikipedia.  The gist is that there are genetically sterile castes....and how could that happen?  What genetic variation, that led to your being sterile, could possibly proliferate in the presence of more 'selfish' variation?  The answer is that the sterile caste members are related to the Queen for whom they sacrifice their own chances at reproduction.

However, this genetic situation simply is not closely associated with sociality even among insects: some have haplodiploidy but don't live in social hives, some in social hives don't have haplodiploidy.  Many behavioral-evolutionary anthropologists seem to be  unaware of any of these unsupportive facts -- clear and repeated exceptions. It is these facts that led E.O. Wilson to abandon his prior strong advocacy of inclusive fitness and, indeed, his coined field of Sociobiology.  But Wilson, now in his dotage, is as simplistic in his new statements as he was in his strong advocacy of sociobiology.

Why is the demise of Hamilton's rule as Gospel such a big deal?  Because it shouldn't have been a Big Deal in the first place.  And yet why should we care what Wilson says this time around anyway?

The problem with all of this is the desire or even deep hunger, to find some precise, competition-centered pat explanation for observations about life. Anything that looks organized is assumed to be due to systematic, force-like Darwinian competition.  Even group selection, which Wilson is now advocating, is a simplistic notion, that orthodox Darwinians cannot accept because it doesn't work strictly at the level of the individual which they insist, for some good reasons, it must, since it is only individuals who carry genes and either do or don't reproduce.  From that point of view, everything that looks cooperative simply must have arisen and/or work strictly to the advantage of the individual.  Or, to be even more precise, it has to work at the level of individual genes.  It has to, to seem like real science!

This is a reverse kind of logic.  If you view the world as horribly selfish and cruel, then of course anything can be explained by selfishness.  On the other hand, if you see cooperation as being important, you can argue that things good for a group advance even if genetically they arise only in one member of the group.  You can argue that over time, the kindliness genes will spread and advance: each kindliness mutation will add to the group's success.  Even those without kindliness variants will do well, but they won't out-do their nicer peers.  Arch Darwinists who seem to be convinced the world is full of cheaters (does this imply that they know they're cheaters themselves, and is some sort of tacit confession?), will always devise (again post hoc) reasons why kindness for unselfish reasons will never win.  Or they will always be able to find reasons why kindness is just competition in disguise.

Cooperation, and we wrote our book Mermaid's Tale largely about it, is pervasive and ubiquitous.  Life is about molecules interacting, cell compartments interacting, cells, organs, and organisms interacting.  Cooperation means co-operation, and only in some social animal contexts is it about cozy kindly interactions including the sort of interactions referred to as 'altruism'.  If an enzyme and its substrate interact to bring about a reaction, that is cooperation.  If one component has the wrong structure or isn't present when the other is, the interaction doesn't occur.  One can't just evolve by out-competing the other.  Things may arise individually, but in various ways must advance in prevalence by successful interactions.  If this is extended to the thousands of interactions in a cell, and among cells in an organism, then why not among organisms in a population?

Sometimes inter-individual competition does certainly occur and sometimes this seems clearly to be related to genetic differences.  And even if there may be some elements of competition -- in the restricted sense simply of some things proliferating faster than others, that fact doesn't gainsay the predominance of cooperation as a fundamental part of the road to success.  Much more of the time what goes on in life is about successful interactions.  Why we resist that recognition is unclear, unless it has to do with the legacy of capitalism and colonialism, and things like that, as some historians and sociologists of science, or opponents of religion, have argued.

Well, the big debate is merely scientists' egos and tribalism speaking.  The obvious truth is that there aren't rules of this simple form for life.  Instead, life by its very nature only has to do what it does.  So if local groups are made of close relatives because individuals are born, live, and die in a general local area, then all one has to have is some sense of parental feeling to be easily extended to sociality.  This is so widespread that in a sense it doesn't require any special explanation or theory at all.  It doesn't require rigid, ubiquitous, or formalized theory--no matter how urgently mathematical biologists want it to be.  And mathematical models are by their own very nature law-like, rigid types of relationship that are far from fitting the realities of Nature--even if those models show how Nature would work to the extent the circumstances resemble the model.  Just as Hamilton's rule, taken properly as a generic guide, is informative.

The idea that if you help kin to an extent as predicted by Hamilton's principles, you'll statistically advance copies of your genes is simply a fact.  But it's also a huge 'if', and the many subtleties and nuances and other sources of variation are so great that, as with  most things in evolution, the theory can't be expected to apply rigidly or always.  Most things drift in or out of populations with little, or perhaps only occasional, help from classical natural selection.  We've discussed this in many posts on MT.  The essential cooperativity is entailed, among other things, by the nature of life as being organized around polymers (DNA and proteins) as we described in a series of recent posts, too.  Again, just because something is plausible and mathematically sound, doesn't mean it happens in real life.

In this sense, which we think is truly profound, life is not like physics and is not a science that requires the kind of rigidity or formal rigor that physical sciences do.  The reason, in a sense, is that life is by its very nature all about differences!  Differences are what enable evolution.

Take on a Big Problem? A ton of money or a tub of water?

Two Nobel laureates were interviewed recently on the BBC Radio 4 program, The Life Scientific, and they said some relevant and interesting things.  The program is new series, interviews with some of the most influential scientists alive.

Paul Nurse, who won his prize for work on the genetics of cell division, was interviewed in October.  His prize was earned essentially because cell division is in many ways a similar process in all forms of life.  In light of evolution this could be said not to be a surprise: the same process might be expected to involve the same mechanism.  On the other hand, there is a lot of parallel evolution and given the complexity of many controlling mechanisms, one gene might substitute for another for the process.  But, at least in terms of some of the controlling genes, evolution somehow maintained the same mechanism over more than a billion years.

The other scientist of particular interest, interviewed in November, was John Sulston.  He innovated methods for mapping (locating) the genes on the genomes (chromosomes) of an important experimental model, the tiny flatworm called C. elegans, and then led the race to sequence the entire human genome.  A main part of this work was done at the Sanger Centre, near Cambridge, England, where I was fortunate enough to spend a sabbatical in 2005.  In his modest self-description, Sulston said that his job was just to identify the entire genome, and let people more clever than he have that information to do the work to find out what different parts of the genome do.

C. elegans; Weiss and Buchanan, Blake Plock, 2009

This moved the field from 'genetics' that dealt with single genes and classical hypothesis-driven science (where you have a specific, restricted idea, and then design experiments to test it), to 'genomics' or what is called hypothesis-free science: sequence everything in every individual you study, and search for unsuspected pattern to emerge that can then be specifically tested.  The latter is more like Victorian plant and beetle specimen collection, that we so often love to criticize as useless, not even 'science', really.

There are two aspects of this that are relevant to the current drive to understand life, largely from the genome perspective. First, Nurse said one should start out a science career by picking a really Big Problem.  Even if you work on a narrow scale, do it to solve a major problem about life--he started out with yeast, before turning to human cells and generalizing how cell division work.

Sulston got a similar prize but by taking a diametrically opposite view: his job was to collect the beetles and let everyone have a crack at the data to see what they could find.  Genomics has been driven by the technology that makes it possible. But it is in some ways the opposite--or even the antithesis--of Nurse's idea.  It is doing a really big study on a really small problem.

GWAS (genome wide association studies) to understand, say, the genomic basis of diabetes may not seem like a small problem.  If the genomic approach works, and it leads to major reductions in diabetes morbidity or mortality, it would be a big success.  But the problem itself is very local and particular, and there is no intent that solving it would apply to a bigger problem.  One can criticize the blind following of this Big Science approach, and it richly deserves the criticism for the manifest, numerous reasons we often point out.

But is this also a big problem hiding under a big budget for a small question?  It is often argued so.  In defense of ever-larger studies of biobanks, GWAS, and the like (or, in regard to evolutionary genetics, of ever more whole genome sequencing from ever more species, applying ever more detailed and exotic statistical tests for evidence of natural selection), defenders often argue that yes, it's expensive, and yes it may be decades before it bears fruit, and yes, GWAS may not identify major causal genes, BUT these studies will reveal biological mechanisms or pathways that will have much broader applicability.

There is no answer to this.  We are clearly, however, training a generation of technocratic scientists who think big budget and big technology either first, or immediately after whatever question they are asking.  And the questions are nowadays mainly applied ones: what causes diabetes or stomach cancer, for example, or what cause skull shape variation.  However the studies are routinely justified for what they will reveal more generally.  We often, if not routinely, point to chance discoveries in the history of science, and say that's what we're aiming for.

Of course, the vast majority of science is routine, if not hum-drum and with little likelihood of any impact other than to feed the investigator and his or her lab group.  It is vainglory of a high magnitude to promise serendipitous Eureka! moments as justification for dipping so deeply into the public treasure for each of our studies.

On the other hand, it is certainly true that Eureka! discovery moments do arise.  So is this an acceptable justification for investment in, say, big-scale genomic approaches?  This is for you to decide.

But what we're doing clearly is proposing the kinds of studies to answer the kinds of questions that require big data and expensive, extensive, and often very complex instrumentation and statistical methods to address.  Inevitably and systematically, perhaps, some issues are being closed to us while others are being opened.   One can argue that the narrower your training or focus the less likely you'll have one of the major moments, but in any field in any era it has always been only the very rare, lucky person who has had one.  Also, without the investment, they certainly can't happen.

Or are these correct arguments in support of the way we do things today?  In the past, it was individuals slogging doggedly after a problem (Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, others) rather than big factory operations (which, to be fair, didn't really exist until fairly recently), that delivered Eureka! discoveries.  Will the lone, persistent, investigator have the next transformative insight?

Nurse had substantial though we think not enormous funding.  Sulston and the Human Genome project garnered enormous funding for their work.  Both got Nobel prizes for their work.  On the other hand, Darwin just worked in his backyard after a low-cost sailing trip round the world, Mendel in his modest garden out back of a monastery, Galileo with a cheap telescope and under house arrest.

And the real Eureka! moment?  That just required Archimedes to take a bath.