Economics and psychology researchers have always been fascinated by the science of deceit. Game theory devotes itself to mathematically anticipating the sweet spots in economic relationships between people. However, evolutionary biologists — once it was established that genes play a decisive role in how we inherit traits — have sought to explore if cheating is solely restricted to people.
Combined with the insights of ethologists, science now finds that cheating is rife across life. Chimpanzees, dolphins, birds and termites all cheat, primarily to get more food and more chances at mating. The propensity to outcompete, whatever the means, is extremely deep-rooted.
However, a group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania may have found just how deep that is. They report evidence that cheating may have possibly percolated into the ‘non-living’ bits of our make up and report in the journal Science that Spindle asymmetry drives non-Mendelian chromosome segregation; that chromosomes may be capable of “cheating”.
Based on observations in mouse oocytes, the precursors of eggs in females, they’ve detected molecular signals that create an asymmetry in the machinery that drives meiosis, the cell-division process that gives rise to sex cells. Certain chromosomes, the researchers found, exploit this asymmetry to move themselves over to the “right” side of a cell during division and wind up in the egg.
For biased transmission to occur, they reasoned, something about the physical machinery of cell division must enable it and the culprit, it emerged, was a lopsided distribution of a modification called tyrosination. This makes the cell asymmetric and the researchers showed that this made certain chromosomes bigger and more likely to get into an egg cell than a competing chromosome.
Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has previously written extensively of the selfishness of babies and even of identical twins still in the womb. It is, of course, likely that there may be deeper mechanisms that certain chromosomes acquire a greater drive to win evolutionary battles but the study shows that there may be cold, chemical — and not always moral — reasons behind the complexity of life. Better technology could tunnel the sources of selfishness and cheating down to the domain of quarks but whether this would be “cheating” or “selfishness” would be a subfield of research in itself.
