-----Original Message----- From: Justin Schwartz <jkschw at hotmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Monday, February 19, 2001 4:28 PM Subject: Re: SJ Gould on genome
>
>OK, as I say, I don't know that much biology anymore. You may be right
about
>the view that Gould is attacking. I am still not sure how the relative
>paucity of human genes has anything to do with it. It doesn't even refute
>the one gene-one protein view. After all, another point I didn't mentioned,
>who's to say that you need specifically human genes to get the proteins you
>get? I mean, maybe a genes we share with chimps producers the appropriate
>protein. As for the view you say Gould attacks, I would have thought it
>unpromising on general principles, and I am not unsympathetic to
>reductionism. --jks
>
C. Schwartz,
True, you were making a point about reductionism in general. The interesting thing about the recent findings is that the already-known-to-be-small percentage of genes we do not share in common with chimps (and fruit flies for that matter) is now revealed to be an alarmingly small absolute number of genes. The one-gene per protein view is immediately refuted by the huge number of proteins already known to exist versus the small genome now decoded but you are right, of course, that the original dogma was scientifically unpromising. I always figured it was wrong. However, even scientists who knew better could not resist it for some reason. Doug Henwood may be right about the bourgeois character of that reason. The bourgeois imagination did seem to run wild with the thought of a simple mechanism to control biology.
The bourgeoisie seems to hate randomness, complexity and contextuality. Are Marxists any better at accepting it? I don't know.
peace
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