Challenges Facing Genetics and Materialism
Journal Title: Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research (BJSTR) - Year 2019, Vol 18, Issue 4
Abstract
There are under-appreciated, serious behavioral challenges to science’s under-standing of life and its DNA-basis. The general problem facing the DNA model, though, has been the inability to identify the DNA origins of many heritable characteristics. This brief commentary will introduce the missing heritability situation and then go on to detail a few behavioral challenges.There are enormous confident expectations about the workings of DNA. For example, Craig Venter succinctly answered the question “What is life?” with the expression, “DNA-driven biological machines” [1]. Additionally, Richard Dawkins stated “DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music” [2]. Also in his 2007 A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life, Craig Venter also stated that the Human Genome Project: has charted a landscape in which we will discover the most intricate workings of our species, the particularities of our own individual genetic makeup, and the promise of novel approaches to health and medicine that will mark a new stage in human development, one in which inherited biology is no longer destiny [3]. The follow-up to the human genome project, though, has been minimally successful, beginning with the ambitions of personal genomics [4-6]. Readers can also see also James D. Watson’s predictions in the April 2003 issue of Scientific American [7] and then compare those to some of the sober general acknowledgements given in the May 2017 Scientific American article on the failure to find the expected DNA origins for the susceptibility to experience the mental illness schizophrenia [8]. One might argue that the expectations with regards to the life-steering capabilities of DNA were overly optimistic. One could conclude this by noting some elaborate innate behaviors such with the migratory instincts of birds or in a contrary way with the puzzling disconnects found between human monozygotic twin pairs. On the other hand, a seemingly striking success for genetic (and evolutionary) reasoning appears to have been obtained in the selective breeding-beget transformation of foxes in the ongoing Siberian domestication experiment (a succinct presentation of those findings can be found in [9]). But is it realistic to suppose that DNA alone can explain the tameness-bred changes including the tailwagging, whimpering, and licking in response to human contact; responding to their names; having “acoustic dynamics of their vocalizations [being] remarkably similar to human laughter”; and also the human friendly appearance makeover (as more generally seen with the domestication syndrome)? That these changes were divorced from environmental causes appears to be beyond doubt as demonstrated via the experiment’s embryo switching protocol. Yet the “secret of life” status of DNA has surely been put on trial with the frustrating follow-up to the deciphering of the human genome. That so many heritable distinctions have found little if any traction amidst our limited collection of variable DNAs should be producing puzzlement.
Authors and Affiliations
Ted Christopher
Keywords
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- EP ID EP621899
- DOI 10.26717/BJSTR.2019.18.003181
- Views 160
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