> There are
> > scientists who doubt that the gene-protein
> > mechanisms of the nucleus produce
> > a plan or blueprint of bodily structure.
>
>
> I must confess I'm lost here. Maybe I'm just too much
> of a Dawkinsian reductionist, but what else could it
> be? I mean, we start from a single cell, and grow
> into a complex organism - where else is the
> information going to come from, if not from the
> structures in that cell?
To give a practical example - the fruit fly, Drosophila, has two well known genetic mutations - one where the eye develops more facets than normal, and one were it develops fewer. In all three forms of the gene - normal, many and few facets - the actual number of facets which develop also varies in response to the temperature of the environment the embryo develops in.
So clearly the behaviour is not simply determined by the genome - there is a process of interaction going on. The DNA->mRNA->protein model is merely a snapshot of a process - there is a whole complex process of gene expression control which relays information back from the cellular environment into the 'gene expression' machinery.
Peter
-- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844