Gene-Whiz Science Is Dead. Yay!
Could the genes-R-us era be ending? I certainly hope so. This Ngram showing the rise and fall of the terms “gene” and “genetic” comes from Philip Ball’s How Life Works, which I highly recommend.
Hoboken, May 14, 2024. For decades, I’ve bashed gene-whiz science, which traces complex traits and disorders—high intelligence, aggression, alcoholism, schizophrenia, sexual orientation, political orientation, you name it--back to single genes.
These click-bait-y claims make the media and public exclaim, “Gee whiz!” Hence my coinage gene-whiz science. But this “science” has an abysmal track record. One study finds evidence for the “gay gene” or “God gene” (which, I shit you not, supposedly makes you believe in God); the next study doesn’t.
The trouble is, media trumpet “discoveries” but not failed follow-ups. The public ends up believing that “our fate is in our genes,” as James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix, once put it.
Gene-whiz science persists. Within the last year, a popular TikTok doctor and the BBC each recycled the myth that a “warrior gene” inclines you to be aggressive. If you’re curious about such claims, and more generally about why we do what we do, you should read Philip Ball’s How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology, which crushes the pernicious idea that genes define us.
Ball is an indefatigable reporter, who seems to have digested every significant recent finding in biology and interviewed every leading researcher. And he is an exceptionally clear writer, who doesn’t indulge in language as intemperate as mine. These qualities make his dismantling of the gene-based paradigm especially persuasive.
Ball asserts that, well, here is how his book jacket puts: “Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works… have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.”
Unlike many science authors, Ball backs up his blurb. He opens by quoting Francis Collins announcing in 2000 that the Human Genome Project, which Collins headed then, had revealed “our own instruction book, previously known only to God.”
Forget the “God” part. Ball’s target is “instruction book,” “blueprint” and other metaphors that exalt genes as life’s prime determinants. These metaphors, Ball contends, do not do justice to biology’s complexities; nor does the idea that the body is a “machine,” because nothing biological is mechanical, straightforward, linear, deterministic.
My pal Gregory Morgan, a philosopher of biology at Stevens Institute of Technology and author of a terrific book on cancer-causing viruses, reminds me that critics have been hammering the genes-R-us model for decades. Yes, but many of these critics were grinding ideological axes. My gripe, for example, is that genetic determinism undercuts efforts to create a more just, peaceful world.
Ball details how the DNA-as-blueprint model fails on scientific grounds. His critique starts with DNA and RNA and proceeds through proteins, cells, organs and embryos to fully grown bodies. Ball demonstrates that everything biological is hideously complicated, because everything is connected to everything else at all scales via twisty feedback loops. Every rule has exceptions, and yet somehow all the parts of an organism work.
Except of course when they don’t work, and we’re afflicted by diseases such as cystic fibrosis, diabetes, leukemia, Covid-19. Reading Ball, you understand why the Human Genome Project has been such a bust when it comes to medical applications. Genes do not straightforwardly “cause” even highly heritable diseases such as sickle-cell anemia or cystic fibrosis.
That’s why there’s been so little progress in gene therapies and “personalized medicine” tailored to each individual’s genome. And why it's been so hard to translate research on cancer viruses and oncogenes into better cancer treatments.
None of the new research, Ball emphasizes, contradicts Darwin’s basic theory of evolution via natural selection. But neo-Darwinism, which combines evolutionary theory and modern genetics, is too gene-centric, Ball asserts. So is the selfish-gene model of Richard Dawkins, who memorably described us as “robot vehicles… blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”
Our culture might have passed “peak gene,” Ball suggests. He presents a Google Ngram showing appearances of “gene” and “genetics” in searchable documents between 1900 and 2022 [see above]. The graph shows the terms surging in the 1990s; plateauing in the decade after the completion of the Human Genome Project; and declining since then.
The gene-centric paradigm may be collapsing, yielding to… What? Too early to say, but Ball has intriguing ideas. A primary task of biology, he proposes, should be to probe the underpinnings of "cognition" and "agency"--that is, goal-seeking behavior--in organisms. He urges biologists not to shun the notion of "purpose" simply because it has been associated with intelligent design and other religious doctrines.
I dig Ball’s proposals because they link biology to the mind-body problem, with which I am obsessed. Narrowly construed, the mind-body problem asks how matter makes a conscious mind. But that puzzle is entangled with the equally hard problems of free will, the self, meaning and morality, which together ask: What are we, what can we be, what should we be?
Good questions. Ball ends his book with a riff on synthetic morphology, which involves “making and hacking” life. Researchers are tweaking species, fusing species and building new species, including ones that incorporate non-biological components. Like a “jellyfish robot,” consisting of a silicone shell wrapped in rat heart-muscle tissue, that mimics the undulations of a real jellyfish.
This research on bio-robots, chimeras, zenobots and organoids creeps me out a bit. But it thrills me, too, because it implies that there are infinite possible kinds of bodies and minds. “Through synthetic morphology,” Ball points out, “we may end up looking not just at ‘life as it could be,’ but at ‘minds as they could be.’”
Instead of reducing our sense of agency, as gene-whiz science does, the post-gene science described by Ball could vastly expand our agency, choices, free will. Ball has reinforced my conviction that science cannot discover a single, true solution to the mind-body problem, because science itself ensures that scientists are chasing a moving target. We can keep devising new ways of seeing ourselves, and being ourselves, forever. Gee whiz!
POSTSCRIPT: In addition to philosopher Gregory Morgan, whom I cite above, two other colleagues at Stevens Institute of Technology have commented on my review:
Historian of science James McClellan: I’m not here particularly to defend the New Synthesis or the Selfish Gene or to deny emergent properties. But it seems to me that you are too anxious to jump on the complexities and unresolved issues with perhaps undeserved glee, hoping for… what? To save some nostalgic, essentialist view of humanity? God? The soul? Etc. Hence your and Ball’s search for agency, goal-seeking behavior, and “purpose.” Ugh. Like Laplace said to Napoleon about God and I would say about all of the above, “I have no need for these hypotheses.” The gene-based paradigm grossly inadequate? It seems to me that the gene-based paradigm has been a great human achievement and one of the most successful intellectual edifices ever created. I see no signs of a “crisis” affecting contemporary genetic research. I see just the opposite: a dynamic field that proves itself every day across a range of disciplines with no real intellectual challenges threatening it.
Philosopher Michael Steinmann: I don’t haven't much to add, except a sarcastic "told you so." Not only are we unable to explain consciousness, we are also unable to really explain organic life. We should celebrate this as good news: who says that the science of the last 200, 300 years would be able get it all? What a presumption! I'm following the proud tradition of Hume, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, who all thought that causal thinking is overrated. I don't want to bring in God to fill the gaps, I'm happy to leave things unanswered. We have great models that show significant correlations in many fields, but there is no answer to the question "why" when it comes to the most important facts of life, e.g., life itself, death, sex, consciousness, illness. Most explanations are only statistical, as there is no science of the individual, as Aristotle already knew. Isn't it a contradiction to say that we are all ants and at the same time have the most amazing scientific capability to figure it all out? Can ants do that?
Further Reading:
Check out my free, online book Mind-Body Problems, which delves deeply into the question of who we truly are. And here are some relevant columns:
Free Will and the Sapolsky Paradox
Free Will and the Could-You-Have-Chosen-Otherwise Gambit
Farts, Boners and Free Will. Seriously