Chimeras and Consciousness: Evolution of the Sensory Self

12. Symbiogenesis in Russia

12 Symbiogenesis in Russia Victor Fet Bacteria, the first individuals, sensed their environments, found sources of energy and matter to maintain and expand their growth, and synchronized with Earth’s great biogeochemical cycles. As they did so, some of them merged to form integrated many-cell communities that became a new kind of cell. Here Fet unfurls the historical contributions of Boris Kozo-Polyansky and Konstantin Mereschkovsky to the great idea that cells with nuclei (such as our cells) come from multiple lines of bacteria. Russian scientists pioneered the now-accepted notion that free-swimming amoebae and the cells of animals and plants derived from permanent symbiosis among separate forms—partnerships that had major consequences for evolutionary history. The word “symbiogenesis”— meaning origin (genesis) through living together (symbio)—was coined in Russia by Konstantin Sergeyevich Mereschkovsky (figure 12.1) in the early twentieth century. That co-evolved symbionts are crucial to biotic innovations in the evolutionary process is taken for granted in certain specialized fields of Russian biology. Although the early symbiogeneticists (Mereschkovsky, Famintsyn, and others) held an evolutionary view of the living world, all except Boris Mikhailovich Kozo-Polyansky (figure 12.2) ignored or denied Charles Darwin’s (1859) mechanism of natural selection as the main source of new species, new organs, new tissues, and other novelties. Kozo-Polyansky’s (1924) integration of Darwinian and other anglophone evolutionary thought with the work of his Russian “symbiogeneticist” predecessors remained virtually unknown in the West before 2000. Ivan E. Wallin, like all the other biologists who wrote in English about living associations of organisms of different ancestries, died ignorant of the magnitude and subtlety of the Russian technical literature on symbiosis as a source of evolutionary innovation. Wallin’s 154 Chapter 12 Figure 12.1 K. S. Mereschkovsky. prescient 1927 book Symbionticism and the Origins of Species, with its invented term equivalent to the Russian idea of “symbiogenesis,” remains little known and grossly underappreciated. My goal here is to bring to modern readers an appreciation of the early evolutionists who developed a vigorous biological literature based on the ideas of symbiogenesis (symbionticism). The concept of species, tissues, cells, and other levels of biological organization as chimeric carries with it immense implications for experimental science and even medical research. (See chapter 17.) Symbiogenetic views have been increasingly shown to be correct by modern methods in genetics, molecular biology, ultrastructural analysis (electron microscopy), and other fields. Symbiogenesis in Russia 155 Figure 12.2 B. M. Kozo-Polyansky. 156 Chapter 12 The word “symbiogenesis” derives from Greek but was coined in Russia. It was introduced by Konstantin Sergeyevich Mereschkovsky (1855–1921), a troubled and biased man but a brilliant and prescient scientist (Sapp et al. 2002). The idea of symbiogenesis as a driving force in evolution was put forward by Mereschkovsky in his 1909 treatise The Theory of Two Plasms as the Basis of Symbiogenesis, a New Study of the Origins of Organisms, in which the famous Kazan University botanist clearly stated that association of genetically disparate and distant organisms provided the major mode of evolutionary change. Mereschkovsky ’s work was known in the West. Several of his important papers were written in German. His final publication, which was in French, attracted little attention among mainstream biologists (Sapp et al. 2002). His suggestions were considered far-fetched and unconventional; it did not help that he considered symbiogenesis as a pacifying and unifying force opposed to Darwin’s natural selection, then customarily seen as a fierce and bloody struggle (Khakhina 1992). Mereschkovsky’s younger compatriot Kozo-Polyansky (1890–1957) published only in Russian. His 1924 book The New Principle of Biology: An Essay of the Theory of Symbiogenesis was never translated into any other language. Kozo-Polyansky—a botanist known for his works on plant systematics—spent most of his life in the Russian provincial city of Voronezh. His book was unknown to researchers of symbiogenesis until recently, when Liya Nikolaevna Khakhina briefly reviewed it in her detailed 1992 book on Russian botanists, including those sympathetic to research in symbiosis. The New Principle of Biology remained obscure even in Russia, where, in the ideologically stultifying atmosphere that prevailed from the 1920s to the 1950s, Kozo-Polyansky’s maverick ideas were shrugged off as a non-scientific fantasy—an attitude quite familiar to symbiogeneticists elsewhere. Kozo-Polyansky was aware of Paul Portier, Ivan Wallin, and many other contemporaries who studied symbiosis in...