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Originally Posted by Megan  Epigenetic adaptation is not a universally accepted idea, is it, Michael, but is somewhat forced from the failure of the genome project to come up with enough genes for genes to be deterministic?
You obviously know a great deal about this, Michael, and I'm just as obviously dabbling, but interested.  |
Oh, I spent about a year and a half arguing fiercely for creationism and eventually found myself more and more on the wrong side, scrabbling for a purchase and hunting desperately for arguments that had a chance. I didn't know all this about information science until the past two years.
Universal acceptance isn't really a feasible goal for any theory; we should never accept any theory as True. At least, not if we're scientists. The best we should do is work with it until it breaks, and then try to come up with a new theory. The theory that Gene 27893 controls the length of your roots broke, so we came up with a new one: epigenetics. Is it somewhat forced? Sure. The goal of science is to squeeze every theory until it snaps, and based on where, when, and how it snaps, to come closer to the truth, or at least come closer to the right question to ask.
In all likelihood, epigenetic theory will similarly snap in the next decade or two, but we'll have learned much from the mistakes in that theory and continue on the quest to understand life.
Every science goes through similar bits. Copernicus snapped Ptolemy's model. Einstein snapped Newton's. Keynes snapped Smith's. Godel snapped Hilbert's. And so on. It's not that the latter was wrong and the former right. It's that the latter model wasn't quite as accurate as the former one. Biological determinism is a rather annoying model, suggesting that life is algorithmic. Robert Rosen would disagree, I think, and advocate systems thinking. Except that he's inconveniently dead. Fortunately, he left behind papers, books, and a admirably tireless daughter. Freeman Dyson, in Infinite In All Directions, lambasted Schrodinger's "What is Life?" for its over-emphasis on the consideration of replication (genes) over metabolism (processes). Epigenetics, in one sense, is a return to metabolism and might be a union between the two.
But I have to reiterate: I'm not a genetic scientist. I know very, very little about genes, and even less about epigenes. Hell, Firefox keeps telling me it's not a word.
