Paul M. Bingham

Paul Montgomery Bingham (born February 25, 1951) is an American molecular biologist and evolutionary biologist, Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University. He is known for his work in molecular biology, and has also published recent articles and a book on human evolution.

Biography

Bingham received his undergraduate degree at Blackburn College in Carlinville Illinois, and then completed his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1980 (thesis advisor, Matthew Meselson) after completing an MS in Microbiology at the University of Illinois (with John W. Drake). He spent two years at the NIEHS before joining the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology and the School of Medicine at Stony Brook University in 1982.

Molecular biology

He was part of a collaborative team that discovered of the parasitic DNA sequence element, the P element transposon This enabled a widely used strategy still used today for retrieving genes from animals. It also shed fundamental new light on how evolution shapes the (self-interested) individual genes that collaborate to build organisms.

With his wife, Zuzana Zachar. he demonstrated that transposon insertion mutations were responsible for most of the alleles used in the development of classical genetics. (Zachar and Bingham, 1982). He also collaborated with Carl Wu and Sarah Elgin (then at Harvard) on fundamental properties of metazoan chromatin structure (Wu, et al., 1979). In collaboration with Margaret Kidwell, then at Brown University, and Gerry Rubin, then at the Carnegie Institution), he carried out the molecular cloning of the P element transposon in Drosophila (Bingham, et al., 1982). This work revolutionized the retrieval of genes in Drosophila and subsequently contributed to progress in metazoan molecular and developmental genetics. He and his collaborators were the first to propose the use of P element transposon tagging to clone the first metazoan RNA polymerase subunit (Searles et al., 1982). This work demonstrated that the P element is a recently invading parasite of the Drosophila genome and gene pool. Thus, P became the first clearly defined metazoan example of this long-suspected phenomenon.

His research group also worked on the nature of metazoan gene regulation (Zachar and Bingham, 1985) and the elucidation of the first case of autoregulation of gene expression at the level of pre-mRNA splicing (Chou, et al., 1987; Zachar, et al., 1987; Bingham, et al., 1988; Spikes et al., 1994) and of critical features of the nuclear organization of pre-mRNA processing and transport (Li and Bingham, 1991; Zachar, et al., 1994). This latter work first clearly established the now-widely accepted model of channeled diffusion for the movement of most pre-mRNAs through the nuclear compartment (reviewed in Kramer, et al., 1994).

Human evolutionary biology

In the mid-1990s, he developed a theory of human uniqueness that proposes a novel explanation of why humans have evolved to be ecologically dominant. The theory has been published in three peer-reviewed journals: The Quarterly Review of Biology, Evolutionary Anthropology and the Journal of Theoretical Biology. (Bingham, 1999 and 2000; Okada and Bingham, 2008).

He and co-author Joanne Souza have developed the theory further in a self-published book, Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe (BookSurge, 2009). This work builds on W.D. Hamilton’s theory of kin selection (Benefit x Relatedness > Cost) and posits that the Homo genus evolved when an ancestral organism developed the ability to effectively manage non-kin conflicts of interests by lowering the cost of coercion between non-kin individuals (Benefit > Cost of Coercion + Cost of Cooperation).

The theory, using precedents established in biological theory, proposes to explain many aspects of human social and sexual behavior. It proposed to account for the evolution of the human species from the advent of its phylogenetic branching from other hominids through physiological and behavioral adaptations until our current civilization. This theory of human uniqueness claims to answer the fundamental scientific challenge posted by Charles Darwin, to explain the descent of man: how did the 'incremental' process of evolution by natural selection suddenly produce an utterly unprecedented kind of animal, humans? It suggests an explanation of human origins, and also of human properties (from speech to political/economic/religious behavior).

According to his theory, the cost to an enforcer of coercing a cheating individual into a cooperative effort, known as the free-rider problem, was lowered when a precursor species to modern humans developed a way to threaten adult conspecifics from a distance by evolving the ability to throw projectiles that can injure the cheater. This reduced the personal risk to the enforcers as formulated by Lanchester's Square Law when they gang up on a cheater. The theory proposes that this adaptation gave bands of humans the ability to repel predators and scavenge their kills in the African savanna. It was later adapted as threat projection towards free-riding conspecifics (cheaters) in non-kin cooperative groups that made the cooperation evolutionarily stable against cheaters who, without coercion by this threat, would otherwise flourish and displace co-operators.

The theory further generalizes to a theory of history, claiming to account for many salient events of the two-million-year course of the human lineage—from the evolution of the Homo genus to the inception of behavioral modernity to the neolithic revolution to the rise of the nation-state (Bingham, 1999 and 2000).

He has presented his theory at The Stony Brook Human Evolution Symposium and Workshop, convened by Richard Leakey [1], and gave the keynote presentation at the NSF-sponsored symposium Strategies for Risk Communication [2] in 2006. Most recently, Bingham joined Noam Chomsky, Marc Hauser, Ray Jackendoff, Philip Lieberman, Ian Tattersall and others to debate the issues surrounding the evolution of human speech at the Morris Symposium on language evolution [3]. He and Souza presented their work on theories of human evolution, behavior and history at the 2009 meeting of the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology.

Academic work

In collaboration with Joanne Souza, he has developed a course [1] on the logic and implications of this new theory [2].

Bingham serves as the Faculty Director of the Freshmen College of Human Development at Stony Brook [3].

Bingham also serves on the management team of Cornerstone Pharmaceuticals, a firm developing cancer therapies, as Vice President of Research. He and his collaborator Prof. Zuzana Zachar recently received the Maffetone Research Prize from the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund for their cancer work.

Publications

• Bingham, P.M.; Souza, J. (2009). Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe. South Carolina, USA: BookSurge. ISBN 1-4392-5412-5. 
• Souza, J.; Bingham, P.M. (2005). "Integration of available and new technologies to raise student understanding and engagement". Journal of Educational Technology Systems. 34 (2): 189–198. doi:10.2190/79MV-UAKA-CK2M-KYBV. 
• Bingham, P. M. (2000). "Human evolution and human history: A complete theory". Evolutionary Anthropology. 9 (6): 248–257. doi:10.1002/1520-6505(2000)9:6<248::AID-EVAN1003>3.0.CO;2-X. 
• Bingham, P. M. (1999). "Human uniqueness: A general theory". Quarterly Review of Biology. 74 (2): 133–169. doi:10.1086/393069. 
• Bingham, P. M. (1997). "Cosuppression comes to the animals". Cell. 90 (3): 385–387. doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(00)80496-1. PMID 9267017. 
• Spikes, D. A.; Kramer, J.; Bingham, PM; Van Doren, K (1994). "SWAP pre-mRNA splicing regulators are a novel, ancient protein family sharing a highly conserved sequence motif with the prp21 family of constitutive splicing proteins". Nucleic Acids Research. 22 (21): 4510–4519. doi:10.1093/nar/22.21.4510. PMC 308487. PMID 7971282. 
• Kramer, J.; Zachar, Z.; Bingham, P.M. (1994). "Nuclear pre-mRNA metabolism: channels and tracks". Trends Cell Biology. 4 (2): 35–37. doi:10.1016/0962-8924(94)90001-9. 
• Zachar, Z.; Kramer, J.; Mims, IP; Bingham, PM (1993). "Evidence for channeled diffusion of pre-mRNAs during nuclear RNA transport in metazoans". Journal of Cell Biology. 121 (4): 729–742. doi:10.1083/jcb.121.4.729. PMC 2119787. PMID 8491768. 
• Li, H.; Bingham, P. M. (1991). "Arginine Serine-Rich Domains of the Su(Wa) and Tra Rna Processing Regulators Target Proteins to a Subnuclear Compartment Implicated in Splicing". Cell. 67 (2): 335–342. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(91)90185-2. PMID 1655279. 
• Zachar, Z.; Bingham, P. M. (1989). "Suppressible Insertion-Induced Mutations in Drosophila". Progress in Nucleic Acid Research and Molecular Biology. Progress in Nucleic Acid Research and Molecular Biology. 36: 87–98. doi:10.1016/S0079-6603(08)60163-4. ISBN 978-0-12-540036-7. PMID 2544017. 
• Bingham, P. M.; Chou, T. B.; Mims, I; Zachar, Z (1988). "On Off Regulation of Gene-Expression at the Level of Splicing". Trends in Genetics. 4 (5): 134–138. doi:10.1016/0168-9525(88)90136-9. PMID 2853467. 
• Chou, T. B.; Zachar, Z. Z.; Bingham, PM (1987). "Developmental expression of a regulatory gene is programmed at the level of splicing". EMBO Journal. 6 (13): 4095–4104. PMC 553892. PMID 2832151. 
• Zachar, Z. Z.; Chou, T. B.; Bingham, PM (1987). "Evidence that a regulatory gene autoregulates splicing of its transcript". EMBO Journal. 6 (13): 4105–4111. PMC 553893. PMID 3443103. 
• Bingham, P. M.; Zachar, Z. (1985). "Evidence That 2 Mutations, W(Dzl) and Z(1), Affecting Synapsis-Dependent Genetic Behavior of White Are Transcriptional Regulatory Mutations". Cell. 40 (4): 819–825. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(85)90341-1. PMID 2580637. 
• Searles, L. L.; Jokerst, R. S.; Bingham, PM; Voelker, RA; Greenleaf, AL (1982). "Molecular-Cloning of Sequences from a Drosophila Rna Polymerase-Ii Locus by P-Element Transposon Tagging". Cell. 31 (3): 585–592. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(82)90314-2. PMID 6297774. 
• Zachar, Z.; Bingham, P. M. (1982). "Regulation of White Locus Expression - the Structure of Mutant Alleles at the White Locus of Drosophila-Melanogaster". Cell. 30 (2): 529–541. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(82)90250-1. PMID 6291773. 
• Bingham, P. M.; Kidwell, M. G.; Rubin, GM (1982). "The Molecular-Basis of P-M Hybrid Dysgenesis - the Role of the P-Element, a P-Strain-Specific Transposon Family". Cell. 29 (3): 995–1004. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(82)90463-9. PMID 6295641. 
• Wu, C.; Bingham, P. M.; Livak, KJ; Holmgren, R; Elgin, SC (1979). "Chromatin Structure of Specific Genes .1. Evidence for Higher-Order Domains of Defined DNA-Sequence". Cell. 16 (4): 797–806. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(79)90095-3. PMID 455449.