Year: 2022

BEYOND DARWIN’S TANGLED BANK. “Ecological communities or consortia, such as biofilms, holobionts, and super-organisms, are not collections of relatively autonomous things but deeply entangled meshes of interdependent processes. This entanglement can make it extremely difficult to establish unequivocally the boundaries of a biological individual, or even to determine how many individuals we are dealing with in a particular situation. This is why ecological relations are best seen as an intertwining of processes.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

CONSEQUENTIAL SHIFT. “The move from substance ontology to process ontology has many interesting biological consequences. The various structures that an organism exhibits are not really fixed, but are instead continuously maintained by a large number of carefully regulated processes, which endow them with their relative stability.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

The first seven days of the zygote. View in LinkedIn

BEYOND ON GROWTH AND FORM. “We are inclined to think of structure and function in biology as alternative forms of abstraction from the continuous flow of underlying processes. Structural descriptions abstract away the temporal dimension, as well as selecting non-arbitrary but underdetermined spatial limits for the entities of interest. Functional descriptions bring back the temporal dimension, but they do so at the cost of focusing on a highly specific set of properties of the entities under consideration.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

OBJECT OR SUBJECT. “Even though linear explanations of function in terms of structure serve valuable purposes in biological research, we need to keep in mind that they provide limited perspectives on biological phenomena. It is always possible, it seems to us, and ultimately even necessary, to treat biological structures as explananda as well as explanantia.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

GENE DOGMA. “The consequent view that all the heritable information transmitted from parent to offspring resides in material particles, namely genes, which replicate during reproduction and trigger the developmental construction of the new individual, has proved remarkably resilient even as its empirical basis has been increasingly eroded. This understanding fits naturally with a substance ontology, as it regards what is inherited as a collection of things—genes—together with their defining properties, namely the dispositions to cause phenotypic effects.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

TRADITIONAL VIEW OF GENES. “A process perspective brings to the foreground two major problems with this substantialist picture. The first has to do with the supposed atomistic nature of genes, and the second concerns the view of reproduction as the transmission of a set of things, an act construed as a sort of passing of genetic batons. Genes for all kinds of phenotypic traits— from fur colour to sexual preference—were conceived of as sequences of nucleotides that have the power to cause or alter these developmental outcomes.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

GENE DOGMA REFUTED. “This traditional picture has, however, been very widely rejected. The development of most traits is now understood to involve features widely distributed across the genome as well as influences from many aspects of the external environment. This has led to growing doubts about the ontological significance of genes as discrete components of genomes, which in turn has prompted a more direct focus on the genome itself. The genome, far from being a fixed source of developmental information, is now increasingly seen as a thoroughly processual entity.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

DENIS NOBLE REVISITED. “What these genomic activities indicate is that, far from there being a one-way control of the cell by the genome, as is still sometimes imagined, the genome is in constant two-way interaction with its cellular context and beyond. The persistence of both, in fact, depends on their interrelations. In short, where once we saw a genome as a set of discrete units or things mechanically controlling their wider environment, now we see interactions of a complex dynamic entity with its even more complex surroundings.” (The Music of Life). https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

BEYOND REPLICANTS. “Biological reproduction— unlike photocopying, in which only a re-production of information is required— involves a degree of material continuity between the original and the descendant. Indeed, in the replication of DNA, new double helices are partially constituted from the material of the old double helices. Treating replication as copying has the inadvertent consequence of diverting attention from the causal process that generates it.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn