6 hours ago
https://iai.tv/articles/weve-got-biology..._auid=2020
INTRO: The Human Genome Project promised genetic-based cures for all the major diseases of mankind, from cancer, to Alzheimer, to schizophrenia. A quarter of a century later, and these sweeping cures haven't materialized. Biologist Denis Noble and his co-authors Raymond Noble and Reine Bourret argue that this failure reveals a flawed foundation in modern biology: treating genes as the system’s controllers rather than its tools. For 60 years this central dogma has mislead biology. Once we overthrow it, we can transform our understanding of how species evolve.
EXCERPT: The gene-centered view led twentieth-century biology down a rabbit hole. By treating genes as the system’s controllers rather than tools, it introduced a misleading dualism—not Descartes’s mind-body dualism, but a mechanistic divide between DNA as the master controller and the living organism as a mere vehicle for carrying the DNA. In Dawkins’s account, genes control us, body and mind. Maintaining genes in a fictional “gene pool” became the “purpose” of a living organism. To make this view work, the body had to be cut off from influencing its future egg and sperm cells. This was the role of the Weismann Barrier, introduced by the German geneticist August Weismann in 1883.
Moreover, this view separated evolution from the other biological sciences and treated the maintenance of the gene pool as the underlying cause—the “real” reason for behavior. In doing so, however, the modern synthesis made another mistake: it presented this idea not as a theoretical construct but as an unbreakable law. As a result, its proponents assumed that a barrier prevented characteristics acquired through one generation’s adaptations from passing to the next—a barrier to the germline. This assumption had profound consequences. It effectively removed organisms’ agency from evolution, treating genes and their mutations as the only elements subject to passive selection. It also assumed that changes in gene expression disappeared from the genome as germ cells formed. Consequently, physiological or behavioral adaptations in any given generation could play no role in evolution; organisms could only watch, as bystanders rather than active players in natural selection. (MORE - missing details)
INTRO: The Human Genome Project promised genetic-based cures for all the major diseases of mankind, from cancer, to Alzheimer, to schizophrenia. A quarter of a century later, and these sweeping cures haven't materialized. Biologist Denis Noble and his co-authors Raymond Noble and Reine Bourret argue that this failure reveals a flawed foundation in modern biology: treating genes as the system’s controllers rather than its tools. For 60 years this central dogma has mislead biology. Once we overthrow it, we can transform our understanding of how species evolve.
EXCERPT: The gene-centered view led twentieth-century biology down a rabbit hole. By treating genes as the system’s controllers rather than tools, it introduced a misleading dualism—not Descartes’s mind-body dualism, but a mechanistic divide between DNA as the master controller and the living organism as a mere vehicle for carrying the DNA. In Dawkins’s account, genes control us, body and mind. Maintaining genes in a fictional “gene pool” became the “purpose” of a living organism. To make this view work, the body had to be cut off from influencing its future egg and sperm cells. This was the role of the Weismann Barrier, introduced by the German geneticist August Weismann in 1883.
Moreover, this view separated evolution from the other biological sciences and treated the maintenance of the gene pool as the underlying cause—the “real” reason for behavior. In doing so, however, the modern synthesis made another mistake: it presented this idea not as a theoretical construct but as an unbreakable law. As a result, its proponents assumed that a barrier prevented characteristics acquired through one generation’s adaptations from passing to the next—a barrier to the germline. This assumption had profound consequences. It effectively removed organisms’ agency from evolution, treating genes and their mutations as the only elements subject to passive selection. It also assumed that changes in gene expression disappeared from the genome as germ cells formed. Consequently, physiological or behavioral adaptations in any given generation could play no role in evolution; organisms could only watch, as bystanders rather than active players in natural selection. (MORE - missing details)
