12.30.05
What Genes Can’t Do
I just discovered and am reading a very interesting book on the gene myth: What Genes Can’t Do, Lenny Moss, MIT, 2003.
It is very hard to properly grasp the history of evolutionary biology, in part because of the complexity of developmental questions that lurk behind, and aren’t explained by, the reductionist account of the twentieth century genetics paradigm. Most biologists don’t seem to grasp the point, and the histories of the subject simply delete anything not part of the standard narrative.
I have long suspected this situation, since reading Lenoir’s book on the teleomechanists, along with Lovtrup’s book on Darwinism, et al. But it is hard to get a grip on such a vast and marginalized subject. This work actually gives some clues to how the confusion arose and persists.
More remarkably it traces the whole history of biology back to eighteenth century, with an excellent account of Kant and Blumenbach, and the insights of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
Very interesting and important material.
From the jacket:
The idea of the gene has been a central organizing theme in contemporary biology, and the Human Genome Project and biotechnological advances have put the gene in the media spotlight. In this book Lenny Moss reconstructs the history of the gene concept, placing it in the context of the perennial interplay between theories of preformationism and theories of epigenesist. He finds that there are not one, but two fundamental-and fundamentally different-senses of “the gene” in scientific use: one the heir to preformationism and the other the heir to epigenesis, “Gene-P,” the preformationist gene concept, serves as an instrumental predictor of phenotypic outcomes, whereas “Gene-D,” the gene of epigenesis, is a developmental resource that specifies possible amino acid sequences for proteins, Moss argues that the popular idea that genes constitute blueprints for organisms is the result of an unwarranted conflation of these independently valid sense of the gene, and he analyzes the rhetorical basis of this conflation,
In the heart of the book, Moss uses the Gene-D/Gene-P distinction to examine the real basis of biological order and of the pathological loss of order in cancer, He provides a detailed analysis of the “order-front-order?’ role of cell membranes and compartmentalization and considers dynamic approaches to biological order such as that of Stuart Kauffman. He reviews the history of cancer research with an emphasis on the oncogene and tumor suppressor gene models and shows how these gene-centered strategies point back to the significance of higher level, multi- cellular organization fields in the onset and progression of cancer. Finally, Moss draws on the findings of the Human Genome Project, biological modularity, and the growing interest in resynthesizing theories of evolution and development to look beyond the “century of the gene” toward a rebirth of biological understanding,
Selection:
A main objective [of chapter 1] is to account for how a putatively misguided notion of the gene could have possibly arisen and in so doing to clarify just what is conceptually at issue. My principal strategy is that of reconstructing the conceptual pathway to our contemporary genes as a highly contingent transformation of those basic life concepts which held sway during the nineteenth century. Telling this story is complicated by the need to debunk two pervasive myths about the life sciences-namely, that real biology only begins with Darwin and that the conceptual ground of genetics owes its existence to some chancy rediscovery of the work of Mendel.
The particular bone I have to pick with these myths has nothing to do with the giving or taking of scientific credits but rather with their role as impediments to a coherent conceptual history of our most basic bio- logical concepts. With respect to the nineteenth century, I have benefited especially from Lenoir’s analysis of the role of a distinctively neo-Kantian teleological heuristic in guiding the central stream of early nineteenth century morphology and physiology. Where I have taken some initiative is in analyzing the conceptual path whereby the holistic notion of Kant and Blumenbach, that of a stock of Keime und Anlagen, becomes reformulated, under the pressure to accommodate Darwinian processes of variation and selection, into an agglomeration of parts. It is in this transition, and in large measure as a kind of conceptual side effect, that the holistic potential and thus the adaptive agency of the living organism was lost to the invisible hand of natural selection and, further down- stream, to “selfish” genes. My claim would be that one simply cannot appreciate the twists and turns and the tensions and bifurcations of twentieth century biology without recognizing the stakes that were set up by that transition. I have referred to this transition as the “phylogenetic turn” to mark the movement away from ontogeny and toward phylogeny as the new center of gravity for the explanation of biological form.
The conceptual chunk-or-anlagen that Mendel dubbed the unit- ‘) character did indeed become the prototype for a new genetic preformationism, but, as Raphael Falk has argued, for Mendel it was only meant to serve as an instrumental function for breeders and not as a universal theory for all of biology. The path from an instrumental to a constitutive attribution of status to the chunk-of-anlagen is recounted, as is the suppression-marginalization of the hereditary role of the cytoplasm (with thanks to Jan Sapp).
Special emphasis is placed on the insightful and critical reflections of Wilhelm Johannsen. It was after all Johannsen who introduced the terms “gene,” “genotype,” and “phenotype” and who did so precisely as a cr tique of preformationist fallacies and on behalf of a return to a holism defined in terms of the full range of developmental phenotypic potentials associated with any genotype. Several pages are devoted to considering the real contemporary relevance of Johannsen’s stunning reflections of 1926. Using Johannsen as a point of departure, I introduce my distinction between the preformationist Gene-P and the epigenesis Gene-D, and from this follows a consideration of what it would mean for a gene to satisfy the conditions for being both a Gene-’P and a Gene-D simultaneously.