Abstract
This article compares two different bodies of theories concerning the role of the genome in life processes. The first group of theories can be indicated as referring to the gene-centric paradigm. Dominated by an informational myth and a mechanistic Cartesian body/mind and form/substance dualism, this considers the genome as an ensemble of discrete units of information governing human body and behavior, and remains hegemonic in life sciences and in the public imagination. The second body of theories employs the principle of the extraordinary plasticity of the (body-)organism and emphasizes the value of the (body-)organism-environment mutual interchange, known as ‘the epigenetic approach’. This approach is outlined, showing a gradual, paradigmatic shift from the genecentric towards an epigenetic approach can be observed in the ‘scientific landscape’ over the last 20 years. The article concludes by formulating the argument that this ‘epigenetic turn’ in life sciences has some important implication for renewing epistemological basis of social sciences.
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Notes
The article is the cooperative result of the PhD research of the first author on ‘Life science technologies and body images’ and the second author’s research on ‘Genomics and the production of commons: Open source as a method ‘to go beyond’ public and private knowledge production’ carried out in cooperation with the Centre for Society and Genomics (CSG) of the University of Nijmegen and the Netherlands Genomics Initiative (NGI). Both authors thank Andy Hilton for his remarks with respect to English language and content.
And ‘the clock’ then also became the metaphor best able to represent the rational structure of the machine, suggests Mumford (1934), this true prototype of the ideal machine a kind of mechanistic paradigm, with its ‘logic of interdependence’, accuracy and efficiency.
It is appropriate to remember again that Descartes did not actually introduce this dualism, as it was already implicit within the ancient Platonic-Christian tradition. Rather, he explicitly separated the body from the soul (or mind) in a secular and scientific framework, providing the power of a rational systematization to this decoupling.
In fact, Descartes donated cultural legitimacy to an already existing medical practice and a new anatomical knowledge that had been emerging in Italy (Padua, Venice, Florence) since the fifteenth century, and had reached a turning point a century before, in 1543, with the astonishing De corporis humani fabrica by Vesalio (the Flemish Andreas van Wesel). In Padua, at that time the most important Gymnasium of the world, Vesalio confuted the Galen’s anatomy, discovering a ‘new body’. In this sense, Vesalio was the main author of a revolution less known but no less important than that of Copernicus (with De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, 1543). We may say that ‘the macrocosmic revolution of the ‘universe factory’ coincided with the microcosmic revolution of the ‘human body factory’’ (Cosmacini 2003: 234, translation by the author [Nicolosi]).
Research director at CNRS and world famous geneticist.
According to Waddington, laboratory empirical research showed that some somatic non-inherited changes provoked on phenotypes by environmental stimuli can be genetically assimilated and transmitted to following generations even when the stimulus which generated them is no longer active. Fundamental here is the fact that the genetic mutations are not random, but environment-oriented or pheno-centered: that is, genes serve the organism within a specific environment.
That is the transmission of information from a cell or multicellular organism to its descendants without that information being encoded in the nucleotide sequence of the gene.
For example this is the case of the so-called alternative splicing. Here we have a process by which a single DNA sequence is able to produce different mRNA and, by consequence, multiple proteins. In the alternative splicing, the environment and the developmental conditions determine which polypeptide will be set. At the same time, several cells are able, with the help of specific enzymes, ‘to cut and paste’ RNA and DNA itself.
A temporary stimulus induces a gene to be active, and its product induces the gene’s activity. It is a model in which A produces B and B produces A within a feedback system. Daughter cells inheriting the gene’s product reproduce the active state.
Here the existing structures of some cells can mold similar ones in daughter cells. It is the membrane organization to be modified and transmitted. Some pathogen agents are, in fact, self-modeling, famously the prions in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in human beings.
Such as the DNA methylation enabling gene activity or inactivity states which are then transmitted in cell lineages.
Called RNAi, this is an EIS able to bringing about stable and inheriting gene silencing: some abnormal RNA molecules are recognized and chopped by a special enzyme (dicer) and the resulting fragments (siRNA) are able to eliminate the mRNA abnormal copies through methylation or a protein mark (Jablonka and Lamb 2007: 166).
Deconstructing the nature/nurture dichotomy, Oyama presents a view in which ontogenetic cycles employ a set of heritable developmental resources. Each generation reconstructs them activating a process very similar to what Maturana and Varela (1980) called autopoiesis.
The ‘Baldwin Effect’ was theorized by the American psychologist James Mark Baldwin. It describes a character change (acquired or learnt behaviour or skill) occurring in an organism as a result of its interaction with its environment and becoming gradually assimilated into its developmental genetic repertoire.
This principle of bricolage is, of course, valid also at the micro-level, as claimed by Monod (1977).
See the ‘genetic assimilation’ (Waddington 1953).
The anthropologist Robert Foley, explicitly inspired by Bateson, used this very explanatory sentence: ‘behavior, particularly the social one, which usually goes beyond the scope of paleo-biology, is essential to understand evolutionary events’ (Foley 1999: 233).
The locus of intentional agency, in Ingold’s work, is the person. He says that: ≪every organism is an open system generated in a relational field that cuts across the interface with the environment. For the developing human organism, that field includes the nexus of relations with other humans. It is this nexus of social relations that constitutes him or her as a person. Thus the process of becoming a person is integral to the process of becoming an organism. […]The human being, then, is not two things but one≫ (Ingold 1989: 220).
It is interesting to note that this is an uncommon case in which hard sciences can help humanities to support a philosophical tradition, that of phenomenology.
These constructive phenomena until now have been incomprehensibly neglected, but today many ecologists and ethnologists are giving new relevance even to animal architectural skills, considered as a form of ecosystem engineering (Gould and Gould 2008).
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Nicolosi, G., Ruivenkamp, G. The epigenetic turn. Med Health Care and Philos 15, 309–319 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-011-9342-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-011-9342-z