Customer Reviews

What Genes Can't Do (Basic Bioethics)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

Note: I asked a professor who researches cell membranes and genetics to read the book, and he did not feel that it was helpful. Too much philosophy, he says, and too little useful science.

From July, 2003: Not for the faint of heart, this book is dense and challenging, though only 199 pages. Nevertheless, Moss makes a case and seems to defend it pretty well. I have read nothing before from Moss or others of the epigenetic programme, nor am I a professional biologist, but I have new respect for the context within which the DNA text is read. At the end of the introductory chapter, I thought that Moss was deeply into the bogus scientist critic wannabe camp of "Science Studies". But in Chapter 2, he examines Doyle and his science studies and finds them shallow and lacking in an explanatory programme. Thumbs up. Then I thought he was going to use Stuart Kauffman and his non-linear dynamics as a order-developing crutch to hobble away from the genome, but he examines Kauffman and concludes that that's no help either. Second thumbs up.

So if I were Moss, I would have been clearer in the intro about not being in those camps. Also his polemics border on strident, but what he ends up saying is "Look, genes can't do it in a vacuum. And there are heritable structures that provide the context around DNA which also shape DNA expression based on the environment and the signals from the rest of the multicellular organism." So he is only attacking people who look at the gene to the exclusion of all else biological. And who really does that? Even Daniel Dennett, the grand philosopher of "Darwinism all the way down" acknowledges that the text is only good in its context.

Maybe Dawkins in his own polemic frenzies gets too extreme.

Nevertheless, Moss shows how a too strict adherence to a "gene uber alles" viewpoint has prevented researchers from seeing other explanatory possibilities. Good examples of where in cancer research theoreticians have had to back away from sweeping claims in the 1980s in the face of contradictory evidence. I haven't gotten to the last chapter yet, but a good read so far.

As far as the other reviewer who will assign this book for his classes, most of his students will hate the big words and deep ideas, but the serious thinkers will say, hey, he's got some good points here.

In 2003, the same year that this book was written, scientists at Advanced Cell Technology created two bantengs by inserting banteng DNA into domestic cow eggs and placing the resulting embryos in cows. They didn't create a banteng-cow hybrid or a cow. No, the cow gave birth to a banteng. Why? Because of the banteng DNA. And because of the banteng DNA alone. So yes: the whole banteng lays somehow encoded in banteng DNA. The cow egg was manipulated by the banteng nucleus in creating a banteng. Inside a cow womb. That simple experiment blows this whole, obscure anti-genecentric and even anti-gene book out of the water.

Tant mieux. For it implies that you don't have to (try to) read horrible phrases like: "My Gene-D is not denied a special template (coding if we must) function, but the scope of this function is limited to within an always phenotypically indeterminate molecular level. Advocates of genetic preformationism, by contrast, argue (by conflationary sleight of hand, I argue) for a large-scale scope of coding, described as a genetic program, book of life, and so forth, that determines the phenotype. In either case this debate looks at DNA qua coding, which is to say DNA qua gene. At this latest biological fin de siecle, DNA has come to burst the bounds of the gene itself. On the threshold of the "postgenomic" era it is has (sic) become possible to glimpse ahead to the nature of molecularized biology after the gene."

If you`re not a gene enthusiast before reading this, you will be. This is detailed, informative, and eye-opening. I will be assigning this as required reading for all my students this year.