Carl Woese: Rediscovering the Tree of Life

        In his book “The Creative Spark,” Augustin Fuentes views creativity as the cornerstone of humanity, essential in our evolution and perseverance as a species. Fuentes describes creativity as not occurring in a vacuum, or out of some miraculous coincidence, but instead as a collaborative, persistent, intrinsic act. A figure of modern science who embodies this is Carl R. Woese, a professor at UIC and a pioneer of evolutionary microbiology. 

In 1977, Woese, having developed a gene sequence-based understanding of biological organization, showing that the evolutionary history of lineages can be tracked to a common ancestral state, in turn discovered an enormous flaw with the way the phylogenetic tree was being understood. Before Woese, the phylogenetic tree, as first imagined by Charles Darwin in 1859, was accepted as having two original branches: Eukarya and Bacteria. A serial non-conformist, Woese was never interested in the popular methods and study of microbiology. He became fixated on RNA and thought it was key to discovering the origin of life. Through his exploration of the genetic material and the comparison of RNA structures across microbes, he created the first purely scientific, and not merely theoretical, phylogenetic tree. On that tree, right at the base, along with Eukarya and Bacteria, was one of the most significant contributions to the understanding of evolution, a new domain, Archaea.                           Woese's findings and interpretations of his data clashed with the popular scientific wisdom of the time. The model of “deep evolution” then—still taught in some textbooks today—was that all life is one of two kinds, prokaryote or eukaryote, the prokaryotes having given rise to “more modern” eukaryotes. Instead, Woese's data showed that the concept of prokaryotes had no evolutionary footing. The eukaryotic nuclear lineage (in contrast to the bacterially derived mitochondria and chloroplasts) did not originate more recently than bacteria or archaea, but was primordial and a sister group to the archaea. These claims enraged many evolutionists, and Woese received harsh criticism from his peers, eventually communicating his frustrations, "I point at the moon and they focus on my finger!" Through his perseverance, commitment to his data, and unmaneuverability in the face of retaliation, his three-domain classification is now widely accepted and is supported by much correlation.

While Woese is often portrayed as a lone maverick, his work was deeply social—another aspect of creativity exemplified in Fuentes’ book. Creativity flourishes in community. Woese collaborated with researchers like George Fox and relied on samples and data shared by scientists around the world, working off of Darwin's framework. His success wasn’t just due to asking a good question and having a good idea—it was due to being able to bring that idea to life, and into acceptance within the scientific community.

Although Woese's work is now popularly accepted, it (along with almost every major scientific breakthrough) was all but shunned by microbiologists and evolutionists for years. I’m left with a question that I don't know the answer to: Why is society so resistant to creativity, when it owes its existence?