Re: "Genes are followers not leaders". Was: Birds of feather...

From: CNCabej (cncabej_at_aol.com)
Date: 12/21/04 

Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 21:49:33 +0000 (UTC)

Tim Tyler wrote:

>CNCabej <cncabej@aol.com> wrote or quoted:

>> The role of genes in heredity is becoming probably the most
>> controversial issue in modern biology. The majority of leading
>> biologists still believe that genes determine the heredity of all the
>> living organisms and their evolution is essentially the evolution of
>> their genes (now the words genetics and genetical have become
>> synonymous to heredity and hereditary!). On the other pole there is
>> a growing minority of distinguished biologists that do not endorse that
>view,
>> or even reject it, insisting that genes do not do more than what is
>> experimentally known they do: provide information for protein biosynthesis.
>
>AFAICT, this issue depends on the size of the universe.
>
>If the universe is unbounded, then there is no bound on
>the quantity of information required to specify one
>important thing which an organism inherits from its parents:
>its location - and consequently environmental inheritance will
>dwarf genetic inheritance.
>
>On the other hand - if the universe is finite, you may well
>be able to express the spatio-temporal location of the
>organism fairly accurately in many fewer bits than it takes
>to specify its genome.
>
>So: the issue of whether genetic or environmental inheritance
>transmits more information down the generations seems to be
>mostly in the hands of the cosmologists.

I am afraid I did not get your point. However, I am not making any comparison
between what you call "genetic or environmental influence" and I would prefer
not to pass the problem of the source of information for erecting metazoan
structure to cosmologists (I believe it is a little outside of their realm).

Thenk you for your thought-provoking comments.

Nelson R. Cabej

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