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Steve Talbott's genomic dynamite

In the current issue of The New Atlantis, the brilliant polymath Steve Talbott supplies a blockbuster essay, one in a promised series on “The Revolution in Biology.”

For schoolchildren of the last couple generations, it would be difficult to overstate the influence of the science of genetics. Biology teachers and students around the world were positively giddy with enthusiasm generated by the possibilities of DNA sequencing and the mapping of the human genome. There was a strong expectation that this process, once complete, would grant us intricate knowledge of the source code of the human machine, thus providing a truly scientific answer to the ancient question, “what is man?” By digging deeply enough, we would discover that life emerges out of the inanimate.

The fervor spread rapidly into popular culture. The number of times a film or television show or late-night comic has portentously referenced the discovery that the human being and the chimpanzee share 98 or 99 percent of their DNA, is truly immense. The factoid became a kind of catchphrase by which to denigrate the uniqueness of human life.

Mr. Talbott (whose 2007 book Devices of the Soul I reviewed here) in this excellent if very demanding essay basically takes dynamite to the whole thing. Not being a biologist by any stretch of the imagination, I can only hope to give the barest outline of what the essay contains. In bald summary, in contains the adumbration of a wholesale revision of 30 years of genetic science, a stinging rebuke of grandiose expectations that accompanied it, and above all a reproach of the reductionist presuppositions that undergirded these expectations.

Talbott is a subtle and graceful writer; bringing this intricate and highly-specialized science into a composition accessible by the lay reader is no easy task, yet he manages to accomplish it brilliantly.

How could we hold our heads up with high-browed, post simian dignity when, as the New Scientist reported in 2003, “chimps are human”? If the DNA of the two species is nearly the same, and if, as most everyone seemed to believe, DNA is destiny, what remained to make us special? Such was the fretting on the human side, anyway. To be truthful, the chimps didn’t seem much interested. And their disinterest, it turns out, was far more fitting than our angst.

The bulk of the essay is given to careful explication of the inadequacies of the long-regnant genomic model to explain gene expression. Portions are unavoidably technical in nature. (I had flashbacks to college biology courses.) The New Atlantis helpfully supplies a short glossary at the end to assist the lay reader. But the burden of the main argument is crystal clear: “Today one can only wonder how we became so invested in the almost sacred importance of an abstract and one-dimensional genetic code — a code so thinly connected to the full-fleshed reality of our selves that its entire import could be captured in a skeletal string of four repeating letters.”

“Certainly the idea of a master program seemed powerful to those who were enamored of it. . . . And yet the most striking thing about the genomic revolution is that the revolution never happened.”

The human body is not a mere implication of clean logical code in abstract conceptual space, but rather a play of complexly shaped and intricately interacting physical substances and forces. Yet the four genetic letters, in the researcher’s mind, became curiously detached from their material matrix. In many scientific discussions it hardly would have mattered whether the letters of the “Book of Life” represented nucleotide bases or completely different molecular combinations. All that counted were certain logical correspondences between code and protein together with a few bits of regulatory logic, all buttressed by the massive weight of an unsupported assumption: somehow, by neatly executing an immaculate, computer-like DNA logic, the organism would fulfill its destiny as a living creature. The details would be worked out later.

Mr. Talbott does not neglect the opportunity for some gentle but pointed humor at the expense of the code enthusiasts. One might even call it Chestertonian: “I’m not aware of any pundit who, brought back to reality from the realm of code-fixated cerebration, would have been so confused about the genetic comparison as to invite the chimp home for dinner to discuss world politics.”

What has Talbott particularly exercised is the error of reductionism, the idea that by digging ever deeper, combing with an ever finer grain of analysis, we will discover rational, mechanistic simplicity at the heart of all life. And he shows splendidly how false this is, and how profoundly its presuppositions have led us astray about the nature of human being: “Having plunged headlong toward the micro and molecular in their drive to reduce the living to the inanimate, biologists now find unapologetic life staring back at them from every chromatogram, every electron micrograph, every gene expression profile. Things do not become simpler, less organic, less animate.”

As I read this essay, I became conscious of a kind of chorus in my mind, a hearkening back to an older formulation of human being, now suddenly brought forth again by the stumbling revisions of human science: the body is the material instantiation of the immortal soul.

The genetic code was supposed to reassure us that something like a computational machine lay beneath the life of the organism. The fixity, precision, and unambiguous logical relations of the code seemed to guarantee its strictly mechanistic performance in the cell. Yet it is this fixity, this notion of a precisely characterizable march from cause to effect — and, more broadly, from gene to trait — that has lately been dissolving more and more into the fluid, dynamic exchange of living processes. Organisms, it appears, must be understood and explained at least in part from above downward, from context to subcontext, from the general laws or character of their being to the never-fully-independent details. To realize the full significance of the truth so often remarked in the technical literature today — namely, that context matters — is indeed to embark on a revolutionary adventure. It means reversing one of the most deeply engrained habits within science — the habit of explaining the whole as the result of its parts.

Talbott’s essay is not yet online. I recommend subscribing to The New Atlantis. These quotations amount to a mere sample of the superb elucidation of a revolution in science that is really return, a restoration of older wisdom, and the doom of reductionism.

Comments (14)

I want to just say here and now that for something on the order of ten years, perhaps longer, my friend Jonathan Wells of the much-hated Discovery Institute has been predicting exactly this. Jon is a fierce opponent of DNA reductionism.

I have a very minor genetic anomaly myself and once pointed out to him (rather proud of my knowledge) the exact type of point mutation on the exact gene that has now been found to "cause" it. "Really?" he said. "That's surprising that they have pinpointed it that exactly."

"Well," I confessed, "It does admit of a lot of phenotypical variation in expression among those who have the mutation. Sometimes the expression is so mild that no one even notices anything."

He smiled and was quick to point out the point of _that_, which is that the point mutation isn't by a long shot the whole story.

So does the essay touch on epigenetics? I've vaguely heard the concept, but I don't think my college profs mentioned it in the late 1990s.

I do think it was an ID sympathizer who drove home to me that the "decoding" cell machinery was possibly at least as important in genetic code interpretation as the DNA itself. (Speaking as a poorly-remembering layman here.)

(Also, how can the New Atlantis so misuse the word "disinterest" when it plainly means "uninterest"? Aside from the fact that the former's common meaning is now the latter. Sigh.)

Half the essay is on epigenetics.

The number of times a film or television show or late-night comic has portentously referenced the discovery that the human being and the chimpanzee share 98 or 99 percent of their DNA, is truly immense

I recall a scientist contributing to the book Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies and taking issue with Jurassic Park with the expository scene on how they made the T-Rex. Taking the blood from a mosquito trapped in amber they had 80% of the genetic material for a T-Rex, so they used frog DNA to make up the rest. "You can't take 80% of something, throw in 20% of something close enough and expect to have a functioning totality." He then remarked how this is the "eye-of-newt, wing of bat" view of science at its worst.

Mr Cella, great post. I wonder apart from our simian brothers, how many species have a 95% or 96% genetic similarity, a little less but still very close, at least arithmetically. It might be too embarrassing for the scientists to find out.
Why stop at 99%?

Philosophers and scientists have almost abandoned the concept of emergence, perhaps it lacks the attraction of breaking things down, to reduce is to know, just like your car engine. Overall this subtraction & division of the most complex thing in the universe, us, is of a piece with the now centuries old assault on on the sanctity of human life, an exercise in aggrieved cynicism, or worse.

You can't take 80% of something, throw in 20% of something close enough and expect to have a functioning totality.

Why not? I have 80% of a Mustang (the car, not the animal) and I take the hoses and spark plugs from a Ford car of the same period. I'd bet it runs. Of the 20% of missing dinosaur DNA, most of the missing elements also belong to birds (something we didn't know when Jurassic Park was made). One can get surprisingly close to the reconstruction of the DNA ofa species with off-the-shelf parts, as it were.

The Chicken

Good luck with that, MC. I'd bet you couldn't even make a chicken that way. :-)

I recall a scientist contributing to the book Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies and taking issue with Jurassic Park with the expository scene on how they made the T-Rex. Taking the blood from a mosquito trapped in amber they had 80% of the genetic material for a T-Rex, so they used frog DNA to make up the rest.

I heard something similar to this myself about Jurassic park and the defining humans as no more than there DNA:

"In particular, it’s not true that one can “represent” all of human life—and especially human consciousness!—by a sequence of four nucleic acids (in DNA). It reminds me of a critique I read of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. In the movie (and presumably the novel, which I haven’t read), the scientists are able to grow a bunch of living dinosaurs from DNA they find preserved in a mosquito that had bitten a dinosaur millions of years in the past. But that alone wouldn’t be enough, because the dinosaur would have to develop inside its mother womb before being laid as an egg.

The same is true with humans. Contrary to science fiction plots, you couldn’t clone an adult replica of someone just from a blood sample. Even if lab technicians could provide an adequate simulation of the person’s mother’s womb, it wouldn't be the exact same."

Also we know that the enviroment within the womb and the hormones that people are exposed to there, have lasting biological effects as well, these will be different for every women depending on her behaviour while pregant and with each baby she has, so it would be close to impossible to create the exact same enviroment in order to make an exact clone anyway.

Lydia:

Good luck with that, MC. I'd bet you couldn't even make a chicken that way. :-)

Who says I couldn't? You haven't seen Mrs. Chicken, have you?

PB:

...so it would be close to impossible to create the exact same enviroment in order to make an exact clone anyway.

Let's modify that to say asynchronous human-made clone. Natural clones (twins) are made that way, all the time. Both share roughly the same environment at the same time. Creating the same environment at a later date is much more difficult.

The Chicken

Let's modify that to say asynchronous human-made clone. Natural clones (twins) are made that way, all the time. Both share roughly the same environment at the same time. Creating the same environment at a later date is much more difficult.

Yeah I get your point, though I wouldn't you'se the term clones to describe twins myself (obviously theres different types of twins) even if they do share the exact same DNA.

Y'all are forgetting the egg, it looks like. Let me know when you succeed in producing live animals by combining the DNA--_all_ the DNA, not just some little bit--from one animal with an enucleated egg from a totally different species in SCNT, okay?

Dolly the sheep was made with a sheep egg. Human twins arise from the splitting of a single human egg.

I mentioned the egg quoting another write in my post.

Well, PB, I didn't mean a dinosaur's being _laid_ in an egg. I meant the egg of _any_ species--the female gamete. There is pretty good reason to believe that it contributes more than just half of the DNA, which is why the only successful cloning that has been done involves using an enucleated egg of the same species of animal.

As a lay-student of biology, I find that I'm more in awe of God reading about the inner workings of living organisms than I ever was reading the bible.

Is that wrong?

This essay is fantastic! I've spent lots of time arguing biology with atheists over the years and have often predicted that science would eventually reveal the ultra-sophistication of God's hand where it hypothesized "sloppiness", "randomness" and "clunkiness".

I feel a bit more vindicated!

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