Dr Ted Steele - "The Language of Life"

Dr Ted Steele is a molecular immunologist who has spent the past 30 odd years investigating how the antibodies produced by the circulating white blood cells of our immune system have evolved genetically, not only in humans and different animal species over millions of years but also within the lifetime of an individual person. His work suggests roles for "soma-to-germline feedback" and "reverse transcription" in the somatic and germline evolution of antibody genes. These esoteric scientific interests have broader significance and have proved controversial on a number of fronts. His work rehabilitates the Lamarckian concept of the inheritance of acquired characteristics as playing a significant role in evolution and providing it with a degree of "anticipatory" purpose.

Ted is also the new Research Director at the CYO ERADE Village Foundation in Canning Vale and he will launch a series of "Science in the Pub" public lectures at the CYO Village Tavern beginning July 6. His contributions are entitled "Language of Life" and he will discuss the controversial and interesting theories of 19th Century biologists Jean Baptiste de Lamarck and Charles Darwin, as well as 20th Century astrophysicists Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold. The pitch of the lectures will be for the “general public “and presuppose no specialist scientific knowledge.

Last year Ted delivered the prestigious R Douglas Wright Lecture at the Melbourne University after which he was awarded the R Douglas Wright Medal which honours the memory of Professor R Douglas "Pansy" Wright former Chancellor of the University of Melbourne and founder of the ANU and Howard Florey Institute. The R Douglas Wright Medal is only given occasionally and the chosen speaker is usually " a scholar or scientist of international standing who through their life's work has marched to the beat of their own drum." Ted's scientific work has been recorded in part in a Film Australia documentary "Ted's Evolution" (2003) and a recent biography "Lamarck's Evolution" by Ross Honeywill (2008).

In his Pub Science lectures Ted will address a number of entrenched views of the world which have a strong grip on our thinking, such as - that life began on Earth in a shallow primordial pond about 4 billion years ago and evolved from simple bacterial cells to complex multicellular animals such as human beings; that Darwinian "Natural Selection" over aeons of time is the sole explanation for the diversity of adapted life we see on Earth; and that coal, oil and natural gases such as methane are from fossil bearing material laid down from long dead living matter which when buried at depth was transformed by geological and biological processes into hydrocarbon fuels over millions of years.

In his last lecture Ted will address whether there is any purpose at all in evolution. In the early years of the 21st century is it really boiling down to a choice between "Darwin or Lamarck?" Last year was the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth - why has the matter not been settled in Darwin's favour? Is it not second nature for us to think of Darwinian natural selection as the main driver of evolution? Variations appear spontaneously in populations of animals such as differences in their behaviour, physical skill, immunities, then the environment via the force of "natural selection" selects those "fit" parents to produce the next generation and thus terminating the "unfit" bloodline. But what about acquired adaptations during the life of the animal or plant as the organism rubs up against the environment? Lamarck considered these bodily changes to be very important - successful somatic adaptations being passed on to progeny. People forget that Darwin was also a strong Lamarckist and actually published a mechanism to explain Lamarckian inheritance through his less well known theory termed "Pangenesis. Ted will suggest there can be a middle way between Darwinian and Lamarckian concepts in understanding of the latter stages of evolution especially in the emergence of complex organisms, higher animals in particular.