Genocentrism

THE COMPLAINT ABOUT THE mousetrap analogy is that it suggests too mechanistic a picture of the biological world. But it may be that standard neo-Darwinism is guilty of a similar defect (which may, incidentally, conspire to make intelligent design creationism look more plausible than it should). What I am referring to is the tendency of neo-Darwinism to explain everything – evolution itself, morphology of individual organisms, and behaviour, individual and social – in terms of genes and their supposed striving to replicate themselves. This tendency has been dubbed by Brian Goodwin ‘genocentrism’, and according to Goodwin, for all its power and success, it fails to account for or to credit the extent to which living things are complex systems, wholes exercising a top down effect on the bits which make them up.

So genes are not, as it were, individual atoms or billiard balls pursuing their own independent ends, and entering into complex organisations only to further their own ends, and turning those organisations to their own ends. Such, of course, is the picture given by talk of selfish genes, but, even assuming it makes sense to think of genes as striving to do anything or that we understand just where they got their impetus to reproduce themselves, this picture is no more true at the genetic level than an analogous form of individualism is true at the social level (Hobbes). An alternative view is being developed currently according to which there is an emergent biological order, in which organisms are seen as wholes, governing their own development from embryonic origins to adulthood. In this new model the lives of complex organisms take on an intrinsic value and quality quite apart from their efficacy at survival and reproduction. It thus stands in opposition to the reductionism of neo-Darwinism, taking organic form and complexity to be irreducible to the parts of the organism, and seeing these forms as guiding the development, the existence and even the creativity of the organism as it makes its way through life.

In a way the emergent complexity view will provide an answer to the intelligent design theorists, for the ‘irreducible complexity’ which so baffles them will now be seen as a fundamental property of biological life, just as natural as the physics of gravitational attraction. What we actually have here is a tertium quid, between the question begging reductionism of the selfish gene and the miraculous and inexplicable activity of the intelligent designer within the created realm. We will also have a view of life and of biology which goes beyond the characteristic Darwinian tropes of the survival of the fittest and of the ‘rigid destruction’ of variations with characteristics ‘in the least degree injurious’ – in Darwin’s own words. (Did anyone, even in the heyday of Darwinism, really believe this last thesis, even though Darwin himself took it to be virtually synonymous with Natural Selection? The fact that they didn’t shows that for all the claims about Darwin’s theory being scientific, in its innermost core it was never taken as refutable.)

It is claimed by its advocates that the recasting of biology in terms of holistic morphogenetic analyses helps us to account for the large scale evolutionary developments which caused Darwin problems. They will also point to the fact that the molecular composition of chromosomes does not in itself determine the forms of the things the chromosome goes on to instruct; principles governing the organisation of the organism in question have to be in play, including both the presence of other features elsewhere in the organism and even environmental influences, such as good mothering, which can in some cases turn genes in their young on, so to speak. The key point is that some of the things genes do are not in themselves determined by the composition of the molecules of the chromosome, but depend for their functioning on feedback mechanisms from within the whole organisms in which the genes exist and on influences from outside the organism. Moreover segments of DNA only replicate themselves fully, without reverting to simpler and simpler forms, in the context of whole systems of cells. Then there is the striking fact that chemically very similar bits of DNA behave differently within organisms, depending on the cellular context and the function of the phenotypical bit they are producing or upholding.

The neo-Darwinist picture is one of genes determining form and behaviour from the bottom up, so to speak, and in a kind of Hobbesian universe in which already existing contractors help each other but only to further their own ends. As already mentioned this picture may inadvertently have given ammunition to the proponents of intelligent design, by making the complexity of whole organisms and even their parts seem more mysterious at the biological level than it really is. In contrast some biologists are coming to see the organism as a whole, as a ‘functional and a structural unity in which the parts exist for and by means of one another in the expression of a particular form. This means that the parts of an organism-leaves, roots, flowers, limbs, eyes, heart, brain-are not made independently and then assembled, as in a machine, but arise as a result of interactions within the developing organism.’ (Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, second edition, Princeton University Press, 2001, p 197) So we should not see what we take to be the parts of organisms, including their genes, to have an independent existence apart from the wholes of which they are parts; and some would extend the notion of the whole here to include the ecology of the environments in which organisms exist, which would suggest a far less confrontational model of the organism-environment relationship than is suggested by classical Darwinism.

We can and indeed should accept a generally evolutionary account of the living world, even if we are ready to contemplate some significant shifts from Darwinian and neo-Darwinian orthodoxy, including the use of the ever burgeoning study of complexity and complex organisations in many areas, from mathematics and chemistry to the social sciences and the study of artificial life. So far, though, much of what I have been pointing to touches on aspects of biology which are beyond my competence to do more than report on in a rather journalistic manner. In my conclusion, though, I will have something to say about the implications of a potential shift from a genocentric biology to a biology of emergent complexity, which focuses on the forms and organisation of organisms as a or even the primary explanatory tool. I want now, though, to look at what strikes me as an unresolved tension which runs through much of Darwin’s own thought, and which bears particularly, though not exclusively, on the application of his theory to the human species. The tension derives from Darwin’s own understanding of evolution.