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Are There Genes?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2017

John Dupré
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Extract

Contrary to one possible interpretation of my title, this paper will not advocate any scepticism or ontological deflation. My concern will rather be with how we should best think about a realm of phenomena the existence of which is in no doubt, what has traditionally been referred to as the genetic. I have no intention of questioning a very well established scientific consensus on this domain. It involves the chemical DNA, which resides in almost all our cells, which is capable of producing copies of itself that accurately reproduce a very long sequence of components, and which plays a role in the physiology of the cell which in certain basic respects is quite well understood. This substance has also achieved a remarkable iconic status in contemporary culture. It is seen as fundamental to personal identity both in the practical sense of providing a criterion of identity through DNA testing, and in the much deeper sense of being seen as, somehow, defining who we are. The latter role is illustrated, for example, by the recent debate about the right of children conceived by sperm donation to know who are their fathers.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 56 , December 2005 , pp. 193 - 210
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2005

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References

2 See especially The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976)Google ScholarPubMed.

3 See http://www.pitt.edu/~kstotz/genes/genes.html

4 Johannsen, Willhelm, Elemente der exakten Erblichkeitslehre. (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1909)Google Scholar.

5 Sturtevant, A. H., ‘The Linear Arrangement of Six Sex-Linked Factors in Drosophila, as Shown by their Mode of Association’, Journal of Experimental Zoology 1 (1913), 43–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 This point was clearly established thirty years ago by Hull, David, The Philosophy of Biological Science (Englewood-Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974)Google Scholar.

7 This improbable but widely cited candidate for an evolved product of genetic processes is due to Devendra Singh, ‘Adaptive Significance of Waist-to-Hip Ratio and Female Physical Attractiveness’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 (1993), 293–307Google Scholar.

8 A sophisticated attempt of this sort is Kenneth Waters, ‘Genes made molecular’, Philosophy of Science 61 (1994), 163–85CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

9 For details of these difficulties, see Fogle, Thomas, ‘The Dissolution of Protein Coding Genes in Molecular Biology’, in The Concept of the Gene in Development and Evolution, Beurton, Peter, Falk, Raphael, and Rheinberger, Hans-Jorg (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3–25Google Scholar; Moss, LennyWhat Genes Can't Do (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

10 See Black, Douglas L., ‘Splicing in the Inner Ear: a Familiar Tune, but what are the Instruments? Neuron, 20 (02, 1998), 165–8CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

11 See Serizawa, Shou et al., ‘Negative Feedback Regulation Ensures the One Receptor—One Olfactory Neuron Rule in Mouse’, Science 302 (19 12, 2003), 2088–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 The critique here has been developed extensively in the context of developmental systems theory. See Oyama, Susan, The Ontogeny of Information (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Griffiths, Paul and Gray, Russell, ‘Developmental Systems and Evolutionary Explanation’, Journal of Philosophy 91 (1994), 277–304Google Scholar.

13 See, for instance, O'Brien, Timothy et al., ‘Genome Function and Nuclear Architecture: From Gene Expression to Nanoscience’, Genome Research (2003), (http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.946403) 1029–41CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

14 For details, see http://www.epigenome.org/index.php