Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

12: Of Genes, Genetics and Genomes

There’s always a danger that people think that because you have a Nobel Prize in something, you know something about other things.

William Phillips (Nobel Prize in Physics 1997)

From Complexity to Perplexity

Physically speaking, genes are sequences of the DNA molecules which constitute the chromosomes in a cell’s nucleus. Functionally speaking, genes are the units that cause the existence and determine the formation of all living organisms. Anyway, this is what the textbooks presently in use are teaching. We are familiar with the history of the hereditary factors which has led to the present concept of the gene. We have met with Darwin’s gemmules, Weismann’s germ plasm and biophores, de Vries’ pangenes and their mutations, the supposed locations (loci) of certain genes on the chromosomes, and the discovery of the structure of DNA molecules, the physical elements of the genes.

We also know of “the Weismann barrier,” the thesis which said that evolution is a process solely going from the genes and the genotype to the materialized organism, the phenotype, never the other way round. This principle stresses the primary importance of the genes, and is closely related to Francis Crick’s “central dogma”, namely that “DNA makes RNA makes protein,” never inversely. “Genetic information flows in only one direction: from DNA outwards. The statement is called ‘the central dogma’ of molecular genetics. It has been elaborated from a vast array of experimental data and seems unlikely ever to be seriously challenged.”¹ Crick, in the opinion of John Horgan one of the most ruthless reductionists in the history of science, “desired to show that life was indeed mechanistic.”²

Such was the way from Darwin’s ignorance of the hereditary process to the triumph of the genes, called “DNA mysticism” and “DNA mania” by André Pichot. The triumphalism of the genes reached its zenith with Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene: “The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.” All life on Earth and in the universe, Dawkins proclaims, is the work of the genes, which for tactical reasons he started calling “replicators.” The origin, the fons et origo of life was not longer to be sought in God, a superior Intelligent Power, or in whatever. It was now located in the genes and their concerted action in the gene pools, for reasons never explained.

Around 1950 biochemical research in nuclear acids was still looked down upon as of little importance. This made Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helix all the more sensational. “For those not studying biology at the time in the early 1950s,” said Edward Wilson, “it is hard to imagine the impact the discovery of the structure of DNA had on our perception of how the world works.”³ Heredity, and consequently evolution, were no longer a matter of fictitious biophores or the calculation of probabilities, but a concrete material structure and mechanism. “Watson and Crick’s achievement stands unrivalled in the annals of twentieth-century biology,” asserts Evelyn Fox Keller.⁴ As a result, biochemistry took on a sudden surge. Between 1953 and 1963 were established: the mechanism of DNA duplication, the existence and the role of messenger RNA and transfer RNA, the genetic code, the mechanism of protein synthesis, and the general principles of the regulation of this synthesis. From this followed practically everything biological which is the standard fare in the media nowadays, such as genomes, clones, microbiology, nanotechnology, and the prediction that in 2050 designer babies will be among us.

Mendel’s statistics, de Vries’ mutations and the mathematical theories applied to genetics may have been for some time relatively simple; defining in practice the exact functions of the huge strings of genes proved exceedingly complex. This was one of the reasons why it was accepted in principle that each hereditary character was brought about by one gene, sometimes called the “one-to-one” theory. Ernst Mayr writes: “For the sake of simplicity, it was traditionally assumed that each gene acted independently of all others. … Scientists assumed that the same gene, no matter where found, always had the same phenotypic effect.”⁵ Another reason was that the one-on-one thesis suited the machine model in biology nicely. “The living being was thus cut up in hereditary characteristics of which each one was associated to a gene, in other words a particle of heredity, whose existence was postulated, but of which one knew neither the nature nor the effect.”⁶

This is the way genetics is still commonly understood. Day after day the discovery of a new correlation between a certain gene and a phenotypic characteristic is announced in the media. “Never in the history of the gene has the term had as much force in the popular imagination as in recent years,” writes Fox Keller, “and, accordingly, never has gene talk had more persuasive – that is, rhetorical – power … The image of genes as clear and distinct causal agents, constituting the basis of all aspects of organismic life, has become so deeply embedded in both popular and scientific thought that it will take far more than good intentions, diligence, or conceptual critique to dislodge it. So, too, the image of a genetic program – although of more recent vintage – has by now become equally embedded in our ways of thinking.”⁷ In simpler words: certain biological myths about genes and genomes are being enforced on the public mind by scientifically unfounded repetition in the media.

A few examples of the one-to-one theory in widely read science magazines must suffice. “Divorce gene blamed for strained marital relation … mapping the cancer genome … sensitivity to bad odours due to a gene …unlocking the secrets of the longevity genes … alcoholism and our genes … the gene which makes meat tender has been identified …which genes cause heart disease … finding mental illness genes …” “Over the past decade,” writes John Horgan, “scientists have linked specific genes to manic depression, schizophrenia, autism, alcoholism, heroin addiction, high IQ, male homosexuality, sadness, extroversion, introversion, social skills, novelty seeking, impulsivity, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, violent aggression, anxiety, seasonal effective disorder, etc. … So far none of the claims linking specific genes to specific, complex behavioural traits and disorders – not one – has been unambiguously confirmed.”⁸

Should the image of “genes as clear and distinct causal agents” then have to be dislodged from popular and scientific thought? Ernst Mayr – here quoted for his authoritative status in evolutionary biology – gives a warning signal. “The effects of genes on development are often surprisingly diverse. … Almost every gene that has been studied in higher organisms has been found to effect more than one organ system, a multiple effect which is known as pleiotropy. … It is doubtful whether any genes that are not pleiotropic exist in higher organisms.”⁹ Denis Noble’s statement on this issue is radical: “There is no one-to-one correspondence between genes and biological functions. … Many gene products, the proteins, must act together to generate biological functions at a higher level. … Each gene may also play a role in many different functions … To form a high level physical function, large numbers of genes are expressed simultaneously. Very probably as much as a third of the genome, 10 000 genes, may be expressed in an organ like the brain.”¹⁰

(It maybe recalled, for the sake of clarity, that in the cell the main elements are the nucleus with its strings of genes, called chromosomes, and the different kinds of proteins. Proteins (RNA, ribonucleic acid) read the information stored in the genes and use it to build other proteins, which in their turn build the cells and organs that form the organism, and keep it alive. From ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ means here the hierarchic order of increasing complexity of the genes, proteins, cells, organs and the organism as a whole. The genome of an organism consists of all the genes contained in a single set of its chromosomes.)

The further the study of the genes progressed in the last decades, the more the complexity of the genes increased. Curious “jumping genes” had already been spotted by Barbara McClintock in the 1940s. A jumping gene, or transposon, is “a mobile genetic element that can become integrated at many different sites in the genome, either by moving from place to place or by producing copies of itself that insert elsewhere in the genome.”¹¹

Then followed the discovery of “junk DNA”, thus called because at first it seemed completely superfluous as it did not code for proteins. Junk DNA consisted of disabled genes or bits of genes scattered across the genomic landscape, and which had been there for millions of years. Astoundingly, more then 98 percent of the human genome seemed be such genetic trash, “stuff that does nothing.” Dawkins soon had an explanation: “The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite, or at best a harmless but useless passenger [^98 percent!], hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA.”¹² Other conclusions were readily drawn, like: junk DNA showed that, if there was a Designer, “he had made serious errors, wasting millions of DNA molecules on a blueprint [of his designs or creatures] full of junk and scribbles.”¹³

Yet, as Michael Behe noted, “it is scientifically unsound to make any assumption of the way things ought to be,” things in this case being the genes and the genome. For it was gradually discovered that so-called junk DNA “contains regulatory sequences that tell other genes when to turn on and off and genes encoding RNA that does not get translated into a protein, as well as a lot of DNA having purposes scientists are only beginning to understand.”¹⁴

(This is one of the examples of what might be called ‘the reflex of simplification’ humans show in the presence of all complex matters, also scientific ones. Drawings of the atom as a miniature solar system are still common – and always of the simplest one, the hydrogen atom – although the picture of the atom has drastically changed decades ago. DNA molecules are represented as minute sections of a double helix, while there number is astronomical and our bodies comprise trillions of cells, all alive and active. Molecules are represented as constructions of tiny spheres and half-spheres connected with tiny pipes, miniatures of the Brussels Atomium. For sure, making complete figures of atomic (and cosmic) realities is impossible, and representing them in simplified drawings is a necessity; but it should be kept in mind that this is a sign of our incapacity to ‘imagine’ the complexity of nature, which is a serious impediment to our understanding of it.)

Another instance of the ever greater complexity molecular biologists are confronted with, is the folding of the proteins. Most proteins consist of some several thousand atoms folded into “an immensely complex spatial arrangement.” “In ways we do not yet understand, the DNA threads are folded into a three-dimensional form in the nucleus of each cell. … At present, we do not know the rules for which combinations are possible and used in coding the proteins.”¹⁵ The full explanation of how the information read from the genes is developed into parts and the whole of an organism should include [but does not yet] “the way in which the string of amino acids coded by the gene becomes a protein, that is, a folded three-dimensional structure. The sequence of amino acids is insufficient to explain this folding, and there are many alternative folded states for any sequence, only one of which is the physiologically active protein.”¹⁶ A gene should no longer be thought of as a linear string of DNA molecules, but as tri-dimensional. It is obvious that the tri-dimensional folding raises the complexity of these molecules enormously.

Taking all this into account, what remains of Dawkins’ “replicators”? Dawkins had launched the term because the gene and its functions became more and more complex and mysterious; the term, in its abstraction, also proved useful to cover genes and memes at the same time. “The only kind of entity that has to exist in order for life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal replicator,” and: “A gene is a replicator with a high copying-fidelity,” he assured his readers.¹⁷ But to replicate is an active verb, and Dawkins replicators were doubtlessly the direct offspring of his selfish genes, “the master programmers.” Yet, it became ever clearer that the genes do not play an active role in the hereditary and life-building process. “It might be more useful to avoid saying that genes do anything at all; it is more that genes are used. They operate under control. … Conditions in the cellular environment will switch a gene on or off to varying degrees.” (Noble¹⁸)

Genes do nothing: they are read by proteins called RNA which are under the control of the cell, which is under the control of the living organism in its environment. “Genes can make nothing,” affirms Lewontin. “A protein is made by a complex system of chemical production involving other proteins, using the particular sequence of nucleotides in a gene to determine the exact formula for the protein being manufactured … Nor are [genes] self-replicating. They cannot make themselves anymore than they can make a protein. Genes are made by a complex machinery of proteins that uses the genes as models for more genes. When we refer to genes as self-replicating, we endow them with a mysterious, autonomous power that seems to place them above the more ordinary materials of the body. Yet if anything in the world can be said to be self-replicating, it is not the gene, but the entire organism as a complex system.”¹⁹

“There is no such thing as a self-replicating molecule in biology and probably there never has been,” concurs Gabriel Dover.²⁰ As pointed out before, if the gene had any deciding power in its actions, as Dawkins selfish-gene clearly has, it would be a replacement of a Creator, Designer, or Life Force, without any explanation of how this came to be. “Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish,” writes Mary Midgley, “any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological.” Therefore the totality of an organism’s genes, its genome, “is not understandable as ‘the book of life’ until it is ‘read’ through its ‘translation’ into physiological function. My contention,” states Denis Noble, “is that this functionality does not reside at the level of the genes. It can’t because, strictly speaking, the genes are ‘blind’ to what they do …”²¹ “It takes more than DNA to make a living organism,” writes Lewontin. “Even the organism does not compute itself from its DNA. A living organism at any moment in its life is the unique consequence of a developmental history that results from the interaction of and determination by internal and external forces.”²²

As the gene, even in its disguise as a replicator, was being put in its place, other elements of life gained in importance: the cell, living element of all organisms, the organism itself, and the environment in which it lives. “The genes cannot do what they do without the proteins. And the proteins are not free agents, either. They respond to influences from across the rest of the organism and ultimately from the environment too.” And then we read this crucial statement by the Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford, Denis Noble: “After all, the genes by themselves are dead. It is only in the fertilized egg cell, with all the proteins, lipids, and other cellular machinery inherited from the mother, that the process of reading the genome to initiate development can get going. … The expression of a gene will involve levels of activity that are determined by the system as a whole. This is so obvious that it is truly extraordinary that there should be such great and repeated need to point this out.”²³

Life is transmitted by life. Although its origin remains unknown, life on Earth has been transmitted for about four billion years through living, self-replicating cells (not genes) which, at one point in the evolution, formed living, self-replicating organisms. The problem is not how tiny bits of matter could become alive, for they cannot; the problem is how life has used matter for its embodiment. “DNA never acts outside the context of a cell. And we inherit much more than our DNA. We inherit the egg cell from our mother with all its machinery, including mitochondria, ribosomes, and other cytoplasmic components, such as the proteins that enter the nucleus to initiate DNA transcription.”²⁴

“And yet,” adds Noble, “the central biological dogma of our time [Crick’s central dogma] is that inheritance is solely through DNA.”²⁵ If this is wrong, what is then the role of the genes, of DNA, in the unfolding event of terrestrial evolution? As Stephen Gould put it: “The DNA does not determine a species, it is the record of a species.” In other words: “Gene differences do not cause evolutionary changes in populations, they register those changes.”²⁶ The genes contain the information of the fundamental plan, acquired through evolutionary heredity, on which a species is built, which is passed on from generation to generation often for five million years or more, and whose extreme complexity is read for the building and keeping alive of an organism that is still more complex, for it may consist of billions and even trillions of cells, in one way or another responding to each other and working together.

Lamarck’s Come-Back

We have noted before that Lamarckism comes knocking at the door every time the conditions of our planet, which are the environment of its organisms, is paid attention to. Weismann and Crick put an insurmountable barrier between the organism and its environment. Only the genes and their mutations were relevant to the evolution of the species and the survival of the fittest, in which the external surroundings played no part at all. Dawkins even expressed the bizarre opinion that the bodies of organisms did not have to exist, “the immortal replicators” would suffice for the job. One wonders how a world peopled by replicators might look like. How would they manage to write a book like The Selfish Gene?

The cutting edge of biological research at present seems to re-establish the obvious and necessary interaction between the organism and its environment. Adaptation and natural selection are clearly related to the living conditions (niche) of the species, in a permanent confrontation and exchange of the organisms with their surroundings. As important is the fact that a living organism is not a material object moved only by external forces, but a living thing that reacts to the external circumstances. The flow of the processes of life can no longer be seen in the reductionist way as going from the genes to the proteins, cells, tissues, organs and organism, but is at each step determined by the more encompassing order and therefore going in the inverse way. “The genes cannot do what they do without the proteins. And the proteins are not free agents either. They respond to influences from across the rest of the organism and ultimately from the environment too.”²⁷

‘Darwinism’ “alienated the inside from the outside, by making an absolute separation between the internal processes that generate the organism and the external processes, the environment, in which the organism must operate,” writes Lewontin. He recognizes this reductionist procedure as “an absolutely essential step in the development of modern biology. Without it, we would still be wallowing in the mire of an obscurantist holism that merged the organic and the inorganic into an unanalyzable whole.” But “the conditions that are necessary for progress at one stage in history become bars to further progress in another”²⁸ – at which we now seem to be arriving.

The interest in Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck’s theory is growing. The principal point of his thesis was that an organism can acquire external characteristics, which become part of its constitution. The source of such an acquisition is an inner need – in French besoin – created by the circumstances (and not an inner ‘will’ as is so often supposed). This has been trenchantly and sarcastically opposed by the reductionist mind on the ground that organisms, which consist of matter, cannot have intentions, or a will, or a need. But then the same reductionist mind has been time and again contradicting itself when it accepted the need to feed, to reproduce and, as the fittest, to gain the upper hand in the evolutionary race. The misunderstandings about “the great taboo that is called Lamarckism” have been considered in the second chapter of this book. Joining André Pichot, whose historical research seems to be spreading also in Anglo-Saxon countries, Denis Noble writes: “Neither Darwin nor Lamarck would recognize this travesty of biological thought,”²⁹ which has been going on since Weismann, i.e. for more than a century.

“A mother transmits to the embryo adverse or favourable influences on its gene expression levels,” writes Noble. “These influences, called ‘maternal effects’, can even extent over several generations. … Inheritance of this kind forms no part of neo-Darwinian theory. On the contrary, it is close to the great taboo that is called ‘Lamarckism’. … A lot of effort is now being devoted to exploring such effects. We are at the beginning of what may be a long and exciting process of discovery. … Lamarckian inheritance would not exclude Darwinian selection. It would complement it, providing yet another source of diversity. … Moreover, the expression or repression of genes may be affected by experience in a previous generation.”³⁰

The “Holy Grail” of Biology

“By the late 1980s it was becoming obvious to most genetic researchers that the heroic effort to find the information specifying life’s order in the genes had failed,” writes Michael Denton. “There was no longer the slightest justification for believing that there exists anything in the genome remotely resembling a programme capable of specifying in detail all the complex order in the phenotype [the living organism]: … It is true that genes influence every aspect of development, but influencing something is not the same as determining it.”³¹ Still, there seems to be a marked difference between the mentality and knowledge of the researchers in the frontline of biology, and the noise generated by some bestselling science authors and the media. NASA is expert at advertising its enterprises, sometimes more with an eye to the funding of its hugely expensive organization and projects than to the information of the public. The human genome project was launched with similar ballyhoo, and announced as no less than “the Holy Grail” of the biological sciences.

A genome is the complete set of genes contained in the nucleus of each of the cells of an organism. It is “all the genes of an organism together.” The DNA molecules of a gene are wound like a double helix consisting of four nucleotides arranged in pairs. In the microscopic nucleus of a cell there are an enormous numbers of such molecules, folded tri-dimensionally, and forming the chromosomes, of which each human body cell contains 46. As the orthodox view of genetics still holds that the formation of an organism is directly based on the genes, the location of their molecules and the sequences in which they are ordered is considered of prime importance.

A few years before the completion of the human genome “one of the most eminent molecular biologists, Sydney Brenner, speaking before a group of colleagues, claimed that, if he had the complete sequence of DNA of an organism and a large enough computer, he could compute the organism. … A similar spirit motivates the claim by yet another major figure in molecular biology, Walter Gilbert, that, when we have the complete sequence of the human genome, ‘we will know what it is to be human’.”³² Such were the claims and the expectations a decade ago. Richard Dawkins, not to be outdone, wrote: “I conjecture that an embryologist of 2050 will feed the genome of an unknown animal into a computer, and the computer will simulate an embryology that will cumulate in a full rendering of the adult animal. … We shall feed the genome of an unknown animal into a computer that will reconstruct not only the form of the animal but the detailed world in which its ancestors lived, including their predators or prey, parasites or hosts, nesting sites, and even hopes and fears.”³³

The mapping and sequencing of the human genome, an international undertaking, was completed in 2003. Our genome is 3 billion base pairs long, which form 20 000 to 30 000 genes. The reason why the last number remains undetermined is precisely what we have met with in the section on the genes: there is no one-to-one effect, different genes are read simultaneously to form the proteins and their constructions, and more and more new mechanisms are being discovered which influence the action of the genes or are necessary for their expression. It did not take long, after all the festivities and media hype around the completion of the sequencing of the human genome, for the volume of the claims to die down. Who remembers the words of President Nixon when he declared the first landing of a human being on the Moon as important as the creation of the universe? Now the Holy Grail of biology would give humankind the power over life (and the power over life means the power over death). Has it?

Michel Morange began his recent book Les secrets du vivant (The Secrets of Life) with the words: “Some years ago the programme of sequencing of the human genome was presented as if it would teach us everything about ourselves. It would be ‘the Grail of human genetics’, according to the American geneticist Walter Gilbert. Today, however, knowing the genome seems, in the words of another American biologist, David Baltimore, the starting point of the post-genomic studies which will reveal to us the foundations of life, and also give us the understanding of our human nature. How to explain such a rapid change?”³⁴

Walter Gilbert, prominent promoter of the HGP, the human genome project, is quoted as saying that, when the genome would be known, one would be able to pull a CD out of one’s pocket and say: “Here is a human being; it’s me!” “Today,” writes Fox Keller, “almost no one would make such a provocative claim. Doubts about the adequacy of sequence information for an understanding of biological function have become ubiquitous, even among molecular biologists, and largely as a consequence of the increasing sophistication of genomic research. … To an increasingly large number of workers at the forefront of contemporary research, it seems evident that the primacy of the gene as the core explanatory concept of biological structure and function is more a feature of the twentieth century [i.e. the past] than it will be of the twenty-first.”³⁵

Epigenetics

“The notion of the gene has been considerably modified because of the progress of our knowledge, so much so that today everyone understands it in his own way, and that there are more questions than answers,” writes Claude Lafon. He adds: “It is thought that we know everything about genetics, and yet we are entering a new era of one new and crucial problem after the other.”³⁶ According to Henry Bauer’s description of the filtering down of a new idea in science, the signs of a new era are not to be sought for in the textbooks or in popular introductions, but in the science magazines. We are also aware that new eras are often announced but almost as often fail to materialize.

In an August 2002 issue of the French magazine Sciences et Avenir (science and future), we read the exclamation: “DNA is not all! Researchers are on the track of a second biological code, contained in the proteins which fashion the DNA into chromosomes: histones.” Given the existing barriers and dogmas, a second biological code contained in the proteins is either a blunder or a genetic revolution. “It has been announced loud and clear: once the DNA molecule would be decoded [as happened in 1953], once its language would be interpreted and copied, the gates of the alchemy of life would be wide open to us. We would then know how an organism is built, how the cellular mechanism keeps it alive, and above all how it might be cured. Alas, our hopes remain unfulfilled – or at least somewhat premature. For, indeed, the processing by the genes does not rest uniquely on the DNA.” (Hervé Ratel³⁷)

In its November 2003 issue Science et Avenir publishes a file on genetics titled: “Crisis in genetics – Decline of the DNA empire.” The banner reads: “The ‘molecule of life’ [namely DNA] is fighting for its life. Not a week goes by without the announcement of other important factors in heredity …” The list of new factors in recent years is indeed amazing: prions, introns, transposons, histones, messenger RNA, transfer RNA, ribosomal RNA, soluble RNA, RNA interference, mitochondrial DNA, and so on. “Today,” says Pierre Sonigo, “it becomes evident that the regulations within the cell – and consequently within the organism – are anything but linear [i.e. one-to-one]: They are part of series of loops without end and inextricable metabolic bifurcations, so that it gets very difficult to determine who does what and controls whom. Anyway, considering the latest research, one conclusion becomes evident: we must leave the notion ‘DNA is everything’ behind us; if not, research in molecular biology may remain marching on the spot for a long time to come.”³⁸

Interviewed for the composition of this file, André Pichot confirms that in the laboratories the genes are no longer considered the active, determining builders of the organism. “The DNA is not a program but a data bank where the contents of the cell find their necessary information.” In the words of Denis Noble, the genes “are read by proteins called RNA which are under the control of the cell.” This, in its turn, reminds us of Stephen Gould’s formulation: “The DNA does not determine a species, it is the record of a species.” In other words: “Gene differences do not cause evolutionary changes in populations, they register those changes.”

Epigenetics, though recognizing the importance of the genes, focuses more and more on the cell as a whole and on the environment. The following definitions of this new branch of the biological sciences may give an idea. It is “a new mode of heredity no longer based on the DNA. … The term ‘epigenetics’ is used to describe the exceptional phenomena which do not fit into classic genetics coded by the DNA. … Epigenetics deals with how gene activity is regulated within a cell. … The epigenetic modifications control the expression of the genetic information, and are partially under the influence of the environment.” According to one expert “the trickle of findings of epigenetic inheritance” two or three decades ago “is turning into a flood.”³⁹

Science et Avenir kept its readers informed about the ongoing revolution in genetics by publishing a new file in March 2008: “Genes do not explain everything.” “All is written in the DNA, all is contained in the DNA,” says the introductory article. “This is the refrain that has been song to us since the structure of this molecule was decoded by James Watson and Francis Crick. … Popularized to excess by the scientists, industrialists and media, the gene, yesterday a certainty, today does not mean much any more. … Focusing excessively on the DNA has quite simply made us forget that it was nothing but one molecule among the thousands contained in a cell. No doubt, it is an important one. But it is totally incapable to describe our character, our ways of behaving, and the changes which our organism is to undergo when confronted with the aggression of the environment in the course of the years.”

This file, put together by a popular science magazine aware of its responsibilities, stresses time and again the revolutionary character of the new genetic discoveries. We read about “epigenetics gaining the upper hand,” and “the revolution in biology.” “What is happening at present is a readjustment of our vision, a kind of salutary stepping back towards the beginnings of genetics before it became synonymous with DNA.” And we are informed that, in December 2007, the geneticist Anne Plessis has organized Les Masterales, a series of lectures under the significant title: “The end of the dogmas in molecular biology.” In an interview, the prominent biophysicist Henri Atlan says: “We must get rid of the fetishism of the gene,”⁴⁰ which reminds us of Pichot’s “DNA mysticism” and “DNA mania.”

French science finds it easier to take its distance from Darwinism, authentic or pseudo. As the aforementioned references are mainly from French sources, they should be counterbalanced by Anglo-Saxon ones. The following are culled from the online edition the popular American magazine New Scientist. Its issue of 9 July 2008 carries the title: “Rewriting Darwin: The new non-genetic inheritance.” It starts as follows: “Half a century before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck outlined his own theory of evolution. The cornerstone of this was the idea that characteristics acquired during an individual’s lifetime can be passed on to their offspring. Lamarck’s theory was ignored or lampooned. … In recent years, ideas along the lines of Richard Dawkins’s concept of the ‘selfish gene’ have come to dominate discussions about heritability, and with the exception of a brief surge of interest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Lamarckism has been consigned to the theory junkyard.

“Now all that is changing. No one is arguing that Lamarck got everything right, but over the past decade it has become increasingly clear that environmental factors, such as diet and stress, can have biological consequences that are transmitted to offspring without a single change to gene sequences taking place. However, fully accepting the idea, provocatively dubbed ‘the new Lamarckism’, would mean a radical rewrite of modern evolutionary theory. Not surprisingly, there are some who see that as heresy. ‘It means the demise of the selfish-gene theory’, says Eva Jablonka at Tel Aviv University, Israel. ‘The whole discourse about heredity and evolution will change.’”⁴¹

“There is more than a little irony in the present state of affairs,” writes Evelyn Fox Keller, “for never in the history of the gene has the term had more prominence, in both the scientific and the popular press. … For the basic fact is that, at the very moment in which gene-talk has come to so powerfully dominate our biological discourse, the prowess of new analytic techniques in molecular biology and the sheer weight of the findings they have enabled have brought the concept of the gene to the verge of collapse. … We find that the gene has become many things – no longer a single entity but a word with great plasticity, defined only by the specific experimental context in which it is used.”⁴²

Of the ongoing revolution in biology, the general public is not yet informed. According to Kuhn’s theory of the scientific paradigms, and the instances from the history of science, the resistance against a fundamental new idea is as ruthless as a fight for life or death. The media are among the most conservative carriers of information where science is concerned, for they must make sure to have it right and are wary of being tricked by wild new ideas. The progress of “epigenetics” will be interesting to follow. But the new scientific data, “a trickle that has become a flood,” are too many and too well-founded to be withheld consideration. What is happening is that the strict, dogmatic tenets of positivism, reductionism, and scientific materialism as whole, are questioned because they no longer agree with the facts. This kind of revolution happened in physics a century ago. Biology may finally catch up, and plenty of surprises are awaiting us in this field.