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With ‘Genes’ Like That, Who Needs an Environment? Postgenomics's Argument for the ‘Ontogeny of Information’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Karola Stotz
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Abstract

The linear sequence specification of a gene product is not provided by the target DNA sequence alone but by the mechanisms of gene expressions. The main actors of these mechanisms, proteins and functional RNAs, relay environmental information to the genome with important consequences to sequence selection and processing. This ‘postgenomic’ reality has implications for our understandings of development not as predetermined by genes but as an epigenetic process. Critics of genetic determinism have long argued that the activity of ‘genes’ and hence their contribution to the phenotype depends on intra- and extraorganismal ‘environmental’ elements. As will be shown here, even the mere physical existence of a `gene' is dependent on its phenotypic context.

Type
Advances in Genomics and Its Conceptual Implications for Development and Evolution
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 73 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers. Edited by Miriam Solomon , December 2006 , pp. 905 - 917
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I am grateful to the Biology Studies Reading Group at Indiana University, especially Lisa Lloyd and Colin Allen, for comments on an earlier draft. This research was supported by National Science Foundation grants 0217567 and 0323496 and supplemental funding by the University of Pittsburgh. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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