Rethinking Biology — public understandings
Review by Philip Ball
‘Rethinking Biology’ offers many useful perspectives on a range of topics, but the book fails to identify a new path that might help biologists better communicate what they know and engineer an escape from the trap of gene-centrism.
“Discover what makes you, you” is the punctuation-challenged promise being sold by 23andMe, the company that offers to analyse your genome by mail order from a saliva sample. For just £79 (in the UK) the company will tell you what your ancestry is: what percentage of “what makes you, you”, say, is “French and German” or “Native American”. There’s no better indicator of how badly biological science has become misrepresented to the public.
It’s bad enough that those figures for carving up your ancestry into ethnic parcels have very little meaning. It’s worse that they reinforce the idea that “racial” identity is fundamentally stamped into your genes. But worst of all is the notion that the person you are is all a product of strands of nucleic acid in your cells.
Such gene-chauvinism shows no slackening — indeed, is still on the rise — even in the face of a growing recognition that the simplistic picture on which the Human Genome Project was launched is now woefully inadequate for explaining what role our genes play in shaping our bodies and behaviour. No, the genome is not a blueprint or an instruction book — but neither do we have a good metaphor to substitute for those, although a few attractive alternatives (such as a musical score) have been suggested. Rethinking Biology grapples with these problems of explanation and communication, and provides some welcome perspectives on the shortcomings of the orthodoxy of the past several decades in talking about biology. At the same time, it exemplifies as well as it illustrates the problems. It’s just a part of the story.
There is a conventional story to this sort of revisionism that runs as follows: the Neodarwinian Modern Synthesis of genetics and evolutionary theory stressed a mechanistic, bottom-up model of biology in which genes were the fundamental components. Epitomised by Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976), it traduced the old focus on the organism in favour of making every aspect of the living world subservient to the “survival impulse” of the individual gene — an impulse that, of course, implied no teleology but simply followed from the mathematics of replication and competition.
This picture (the story goes) was fueled by a desire to drive out mystical notions of any benevolent guiding agency and to wake us up to the harsh contingencies of a godless universe. But now we can see the flaws in this reductionist view, and must instead embrace the full complexities of biological science: to dethrone the gene and instead consider life’s “endless forms most beautiful” to be emergent and irreducible. Evolution is about much more than ruthless competition, and can’t be understood solely at the level of the gene.
Several of the chapters in this book tell some form of this story, albeit often in a less caricatured and more erudite fashion. And it has a lot going for it. But ultimately it falls short of what is really needed in a “rethinking” of biology.
For one thing, we can’t ignore the importance of genes. It is indisputable that our traits and behaviour do bear a strong imprint of genetic influence. As this becomes ever more plain — thanks in part to the better statistics that gene companies are collecting — there are going to be some thorny social and ethical questions that can’t be sidestepped with appeals to complexity. The implications for determining disease risk and for finding therapies are immense too.
And while complexity, self-organization and emergence are easy to invoke, it is much more challenging to turn them into concepts and tools that help biologists answer the questions that preoccupy them. The fact is that many biologists, working at scales from molecules to cells to organisms, ecosystems and evolutionary trajectories, don’t have any time either for the crude painting-by-numbers version of Neodarwinism outlined above.
Yet today’s scientists struggle to find narratives as compelling and comprehensible as the one that seemed so revelatory when The Selfish Gene was first published (or, for that matter, to find communicators as clear and persuasive as Dawkins was). Sydney Brenner was just one of the prominent voices arguing that the cell, not the gene, must be placed at the centre of 21st-century biology. Developments in embryology, stem cells, cell reprogramming and tissue engineering make a compelling case for that. But it’s hard to compete with a story that says we are all just gene machines.
Rethinking Biology offers many useful perspectives on a range of topics:
- why neuroscience and brain imaging threaten to create a reductive view of self and behaviour every bit as misleading as the genetic one,
- why adaptationism needs taming in evolutionary narratives,
- and why public engagement needs, as Steven Yearley puts it in his contribution to the book, “to design methods of participation in policy debates which benefit from the kinds of knowledge people can meaningfully bring.”
But the book fails to identify a new path that might help biologists better communicate what they know and engineer an escape from the trap of gene-centrism. The signs so far are that the public might be offered just another simplistic alternative: look, it’s not genetics, its epigenetics! What is really needed, both to make progress in biology and to improve the conversations we have about it, is a re-evaluation of how we define causation and where we look for it.
Genes are often not so much causes as boundary conditions — but molecular mechanisms too are shackled with machine notions of switches and logic gates that don’t seem serviceable for understanding, say, how genes are regulated by chromatin repackaging, non-selective binding or phase separation. It’s going to be difficult to work out how to tell stories about such things. But if the alternative is a crude and even dangerous genetic determinism, we’re obliged to try.
Philip Ball is a freelance science writer. He worked previously at Nature for over 20 years, first as an editor for physical sciences and then as a Consultant Editor. Philip is the author of many popular books on science. His most recent book is How To Grow A Human (William Collins, 2019).
