**7. Genesis of a renaissance – Cooperative biocommunication**

546 The Complex World of Polysaccharides

**6. The evolutive beliefs** 

About seven hundred and fifty million years ago, the first multicellular organisms appeared on earth. Since then, cells from multicellular organisms have found a way to become smarter. Multicellular life forms were initially isolated communities or "colonies" of unicellular organisms. However, the evolutionary advantages of living in a community soon led to communities composed of millions and billions of individual cells socially interactive. The evolutionary trend towards increasing complexity in the community is but a reflection of the biological imperative of survival. The better an organism perceives the surrounding environment, the more chances to survive. Unfortunately, we "forget" that cooperation is conveniently necessary for the evolution when Charles Darwin brought out a radically different theory about the origin of life. One hundred and fifty years ago, Darwin concluded that living organisms are involved in a constant "struggle for survival". In the final chapter of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The maintenance of favored races in the struggle for existence, Darwin speaks of an unstable "struggle for existence" and that evolution is conditioned by "the war of nature, from famine and death". This concept is related to the Darwinian notion that evolution occurs at random [76]. While Darwin is the most famous evolutionist, the first scientist to consider evolution as a scientific fact was the distinguished French biologist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck [77,78]. Even Ernst Mayr, the principal agent of the "neo-Darwinism," a modernization of Darwin's theory that incorporates molecular genetics of the twentieth century, admits that Lamarck was the pioneer [79]. Lamarck presented his theory not only fifty years before Darwin, but also offered a far less violent theory of evolutionary mechanisms. Lamarck's theory suggests that evolution is based on a cooperative and "instructive" interaction between organisms and the environment that allows living things to survive and evolve in a dynamic world. His idea was that organisms acquire and pass on the necessary adaptations to survive in a changing environment. One of the reasons why scientists are rethinking the theories of Lamarck is that evolutionists continue to remind the invaluable role of cooperation in maintaining life in the biosphere. In the book Darwin's Blind Spot written in 2002 by British physicist Frank Ryan has been recorded a number of these relationships [80]. Today, the understanding of cooperation in nature is much deeper than that obtained by simple observation. Biologists are increasingly aware that the animals have coevolved with different sets of microorganisms necessary for a healthy and "normal" development [81]. Recent advances in genetics have revealed an additional mechanism of cooperation between species. It has been discovered that genes are shared not only among individual members of a species (sexual reproduction) but also between members of different species. The distribution of information through gene transfer accelerates the process of evolution, in view that organisms can learn lessons "learned" by others [82-85]. Because of this distribution of genes, organisms can no longer be considered as isolated entities, there are no walls between species [86]. The distribution of genes is not a "by chance" mechanism. Is the method that nature uses to increase the survival of the biosphere. Genes are nothing more than a physical memory of the experiences learned by the organisms, the exchange of these genes between species spreads these "memories" and, consequently, influences the survival of all

Darwinian theory emphasizes competition and selection of the individual as a main guiding force in evolution (not cooperation or group membership). Evidence supports the fact that viruses and other genetic parasites are key elements in the evolution of all living organisms. In "Life: The Communicative Structure", Dr. Witzany suggests that the genesis of new species, genera, and realms of organisms would not occur in any neo-Darwinistic sense via "chance mutations" and selection, but via a kind of innovation code (evolution code, creation code, text generating code), which is capable of DNA/RNA text editing [88]. It turns out that the genetic code that encodes proteins -practically the sole subject of current bioengineering- is only a kind of structuring vocabulary, and not a complete structure in itself, and is subjected to a high-order regulatory code that lies hidden in the nonproteincoding regions of the DNA, which have been identified as RNA agents many years later [89]. There is increasing evidence that all cellular life is colonized by exogenous and/or endogenous viruses in a nonlytic but persistent lifestyle. A persistent lifestyle in cellular lifeforms most often seems to derive from an equilibrium status reached by at least two competing genetic and the immune function of the host that keeps them in balance. If we imagine that humans and one of the simplest animals, *Caenorhabditis elegans*, share a nearly equal number of genes (ca. 20,000) it become obvious that the elements that create the enormous diversity are not the protein coding genes but their higher order regulatory network that is processed by the mobile genetic elements, such as transposons and retroposons and noncoding RNAs [90]. If we consider the important role of the highly structured and ordered regulatory network of noncoding RNAs as not being randomly derived, one of the most favorable models with explanatory power is the virus-first thesis [91].

For many decades it was common practice to speak about the "genetic code" with its inherent language-like features. The concept postulated by Manfred Eigen that nucleic acid sequences are comparable to and function like a real language, coherent with a (molecular) syntax, linguistic and a vocabulary, was commonly used in genetics, cell biology, and molecular biology.

In contrast with the evolutionary paradigm of random assemblies of nucleic acids that constitute the genetic text we do not know any real-life languages or codes which emerged as a randomly derived mixture of characters. Every language is based on signs, whether they are signals or symbols. In humans and other animals they are transported auditively, visually, or tactilely. In nonhuman living beings they are transported by small molecules in crystallized, fluid, and gaseous form. Additionally these signs can be combined coherently with combinatorial rules (syntax). Signs are not generated and used by themselves, but in real-life languages by living beings. These sign-generating and sign-using agents live *in vivo* in continued changing interactions and environmental circumstances (interaction HSV-cellscarrageenans). This is the context (pragmatics) in which a living being is interwoven. This context determines the meaning (semantics) of the signs in messages that are used to communicate and to coordinate single as well as group behavior (changes in HSVglycoproteins in contact with cell surface modificate innate response). Therefore, we may understand that the same sentence, or the same syntactic sequence order, of any language or code can have different, and in extreme cases, opposite meanings and therefore transport different messages. The important consequence of this fact is that it is not possible to extract the meaning of an information content solely out of the syntactic structure, but someone has to identify the context within which the living being uses this syntactic structure. The primary agents are not the sequences of signs, nor the rules which determine sequences, but the living agents. Without living agents there are no signs, no semiotic rules, no signalling, and no communication, no living agents could coordinate growth and development. If we assume the genetic code to function language-like, knowing that no language which has been observed functions by itself, then we have to postulate living agents that are competent to use signs coherent with syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic rules. Adapted to the genetic code, this means that there must be living agents competent in generation and integration of meaningful nucleotide sequences, and meaningful nucleotide sequences are not a randomly derived mixture of nucleotides. In accord with Dr. Witzany, this view could change the construction of research projects, that is, shifting the focus from mutational (random) changes of nucleotide sequences to investigating nucleotide sequences from the perspective of viral-derived sequences that now play important roles in the regulation of cellular functions, for example, HSV asymptomatic infection where the virus have reached an equilibrium status balance by the immune response of the infected host to achieve a latent lifestyle. Their status within one of many addiction modules (genetic and genomic innovations) together with the host immune system, each of them a unique culturedependent habitat can be changed by nonbeneficial circumstance for the cell (e.g., stress) and they may become lytic again, resulting in a variety of diseases [59].

### **8. Conclusion**

This work invites us to think about a possible alternative to attenuate virus for basic science study, therapeutical or prophylatic applications, employing natural compounds with chemical structures already "seen" by the pathogen and present in the host as essential cellular components widely distributed in nature. Besides, selective reexpression of viral ligands (using different type of polysaccharides) in conjunction with pathogenesis experiments will allow the testing of predictions about putative protective roles played by some glycans in certain tissues. Studying the comparative glycobiology of closely and distantly related species should also help, by ascertaining the rates of glycan diversification during evolution.This strategy could be considered as a natural evolutionary process where the virus contributes with valuable "updated" information gathered from previous ancestral infections and making it available for "new" actual hosts, generating a reciprocal benefit between host and virus.
