Is Life Law-Like?

Abstract

Genes are generally assumed to be primary biological causes of biological phenotypes and their evolution. In just over a century, a research agenda that has built on Mendel's experiments and on Darwin's theory of natural selection as a law of nature has had unprecedented scientific success in isolating and characterizing many aspects of genetic causation. We revel in these successes, and yet the story is not quite so simple. The complex cooperative nature of genetic architecture and its evolution include teasingly tractable components, but much remains elusive. The proliferation of data generated in our "omics" age raises the question of whether we even have (or need) a unified theory or "law" of life, or even clear standards of inference by which to answer the question. If not, this not only has implications for the widely promulgated belief that we will soon be able to predict phenotypes like disease risk from genes, but also speaks to the limitations in the underlying science itself. Much of life seems to be characterized by ad hoc, ephemeral, contextual probabilism without proper underlying distributions. To the extent that this is true, causal effects are not asymptotically predictable, and new ways of understanding life may be required.Perhaps the correct way of viewing the whole subject would be to look at the inheritance of every character whatever as the rule, and the non-inheritance as the anomaly.Charles Darwin (1859)

Genetic determinism in the Finnish upper secondary school biology textbooks

“…This view is in disagreement with the contemporary view of complex interactions of many genes and environmental effects on building the phenotype (Weiss & Buchanan, 2011). This complexity has, in fact, been understood for at least a century due to the research in quantitative genetics (Buchanan, Sholtis, Richtsmeier, & Weiss, 2009), even though it has been easier to do research on genotype-phenotype link one gene at a time.…”

Bottom, Crowned with an Ass's Head: Does an inversion in thinking portend the end of Enlightenment science?

“…1 ''Omics'' constitutes a confession, though often couched in braggadocio, that we don't have good enough hypotheses. It's fun to mock the herd-like nature of scientists, following whatever is in fashion.…”

“…This produces new knowledge that, despite its shallow faddishness, may signal something that could be truly profound: the end of four centuries of a particular way of understanding nature. 1 Perhaps the experiment-based top-down approach to science is yielding to what will engender entirely new ways of thinking. When specific facts and theories don't provide sufficient explanations, going bottom up may not be as asinine as it may seem.…”

“…Such studies use the classical approach that has developed as the foundation of modern science since its origin 400 years ago during the Enlightenment. 1 This approach rests on the belief that there are laws of nature and that what we call the scientific method is the way to understand them. Conclusions are based on formal tests of hypotheses in light of such laws.…”

The red queen and her king: Cooperation at all levels of life

“…Small selective differences could not be detected with any meaningful statistical significance in primate troops of a few tens or even hundreds of individuals, nor in scattered nontroop primates, nor in ancestral human demes, even in principle. Even if tiny advantage were usually to prevail in the end, over thousands of generations, the complex cooperative nature of biological traits, as we describe below, means that most of the time many individual genetic elements contribute to adaptive evolution, with few being of strong individual importance (Weiss 2011; Weiss and Buchanan, 2011). To focus on such tiny differences is more a reflection of our culture than of life itself.…”