"The failure of genetic determinism."

Is this the next frontier in biology?  Richard Strohman thinks so.  He's professor emeritus of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and he has a book coming out called The End of the Genetic Paradigm (which has, however, been "soon to be published" for about 8 years).

When the highly anticipated sequencing of the human genome was completed in February, a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle announced: "Genome Discovery Shocks Scientists." The discovery was that many fewer genes were found (30,000) for the human genome than had been expected (100,000), and discussion focused on the wonder of it all: that a fertile human egg could create such a different organism than a mouse egg, where the human egg had only 300 unique genes not found in the mouse. [...]

If the program for life is not in our genes, then where is it, and what is it? Many of us have been saying for years that there is no program in the sense of an inherited, pre-existing script ready to be read. Rather, inside each cell there are regulatory networks of proteins that function to sense or measure changes in the cellular environment and interpret those signals so that the cell makes an appropriate response.

 

[G]enetics alone does not tell us who we are, or who we can or will be. The new findings of epigenetic or dynamic regulatory systems in cells describe an information management system that we have known about for quite a while but are only now beginning to understand. While, as [the late Stephen Jay] Gould says, the genetic reductionist theory has collapsed, the epigenetic, or dynamic, point of view retains genetics as part of a new theory or paradigm for life, one that has striking implications for the future of the life sciences. [...]

[W]e do not now how organisms make themselves. We are still, as many developmental biologists have said, in the dark ages about how organisms regulate their genomes to produce adults. [...]

We thought the program was in the genes, and then in the proteins encoded by genes. But [...] knowing all the individual proteins would not reveal a program; for that you need to know the rules of protein networks that are coextensive with the cell itself. The program location is the cell as a whole, and the cell, through signaling pathways, is connected to larger wholes and to the external world.

Another case of "the more you know, the more you realize how little you know."

Comments

[realpc]

"the more you know, the more you realize how little you know" has long been acknowledged in physics, but is just starting to be acknowledged in biology.

Biology has always been reductionist, but that's changing. We are never going to grasp the whole, but at least we're beginning to see that there is a whole.

Holistic biology will undermine neo-Darwinism. I knew neo-Darwinism was wrong ever since reading Arthur Koestler 20 years ago.

Intelligent Design just says neo-Darwinism is wrong, or at least tremendously incomplete.

I can't wait until someone figures out how to detect those morphogenetic fields!

[amba]

Real, I owe you a hat tip on this. I finished the post and had to run out the door.

[James]

The falsification of Neo-D doesn't validate ID. How would this information prove that there is an intelligent agent who created biological organisms or at least biological information?

[amba]

It doesn't. It might, however suggest (not prove) that fields, like Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields, could be involved in body organization and development.

[realpc]

"The falsification of Neo-D doesn't validate ID. How would this information prove that there is an intelligent agent who created biological organisms or at least biological information?"

ID does NOT claim anything about intelligent agents, first of all. It just says intelligence appears to be involved in the creation of life.

ID is all about falsification of Neo-D. If Neo-D is proven to be incomplete, the question of how life evolved will be re-opened. That question has been closed for decades.

The answer was simple and, supposedly, the simplest answers are the best. Well yes, provided they actually answer the question.

ID researchers say that life is too complex to have originated and evolved by chance and natural selection alone. ID opponents say life is not really complex, and it's badly designed. But as more is learned, the incredible complexity and ingenious design of life becomes harder to deny.

[realpc]

"It might, however suggest (not prove) that fields, like Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields, could be involved in body organization and development."

Yes, and I don't know why that idea never occurs to biologists. No one complains about the use of the field concept to explain organization in physics.

For historical reasons, I suppose, life fields and life energies have been taboo concepts in 20th and 21st century biology.

And it's also because new-agers all believe in these things. Wouldn't it be embarrassing if serious scientists had to agree with new-agers about something?