The Meanings of the Gene and the Future of the Phenotype

Lenny Moss

Department of Sociology and Philosophy

University of Exeter 
 

Introduction

Grasping at Complexity

How does one analyze a living organism?  It’s not as easily settled a question as it may sometimes appear.  For all the indisputable success of reductionist approaches in biology we are still not yet so very close to being able to explain how an embryo develops or even how a single cell functions. If biologists were able to build a living organism, even the simplest of living cells, out of purified parts, it would certainly do much to settle methodological and epistemological conundrums over questions of relative holism versus relative reductionism and presumably it would bring biology into a more seamless continuum with the physical sciences.  Good intentions and boastful ambitions notwithstanding, we still cannot predict when that feat will be accomplished.  And unless and until it is accomplished (and maybe even after that) the study of the living will be uniquely burdened with the dilemma of whether to try to grab onto basic units or parts, hypothetical or otherwise, and then proceed to work one’s way ‘up’ to the complexity of a whole living system, or to begin at some minimum level of in-tact living complexity and attempt to poke it and probe it, hypothesize about it and take its measure in every conceivable fashion while yet preserving its integrity as a living system.  Not that these need be mutually exclusive approaches – far from it.  But how to relate the one to the other also remains an open question – bold claims by behavioural geneticists notwithstanding.    
 

Earlier in the century, Niels Bohr famously speculated that there was no way to bridge these two standpoints, that rather, on the model of the wave and particle in quantum mechanics, they would be destined to co-exist independent