Lock the doors! Hide the children! The boogeymen will get you! Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins have destroyed biology by reducing humans to nothing more than genes! They are destroying humanity by denigrating agency and purpose.
That's the message conveyed by Denis Noble and others in numerous books and articles aimed at the general public. The latest attempt is an article by Denis Noble, his brother Raymond Noble, and their colleague, Reine Bourret: We've got biology wrong, and that's why the Human Genome Project failed. The subtitle is, "Crick and Dawkins' Selfish Gene made a mistake."
Sandwalk readers know about the all-too-familiar narrative. It involves lies about the central dogma of molecular biology and over-the-top exaggerations concerning the impact of the gene-centric view of evolution.
I'm not going to get into a detailed discussion about why Denis Noble and his colleagues are wrong about the central dogma and why they don't understand that the gene-centric view of Dawkins is not widely accepted in evolutionary biology. However, I will post a few quotes from the article to illustrate the problem.
Here's what I don't understand. Denis Noble and others like him have been corrected many, many times over the past few decades, but they steadfastly refuse to modify their lies and exaggerations. Why?
The Human Genome Project promised genetic-based cures for all the major diseases of mankind, from cancer, to Alzheimer, to schizophrenia. A quarter of a century later, and these sweeping cures haven't materialized. Biologist Denis Noble and his co-authors Raymond Noble and Reine Bourret argue that this failure reveals a flawed foundation in modern biology: treating genes as the system’s controllers rather than its tools. For 60 years this central dogma has mislead (sic) biology. Once we overthrow it, we can transform our understanding of how species evolve.
The central dogma figure that Noble et al. posted has one thing going for it—with the addition of the extra lie ("1970 formulation"), it becomes the worst central dogma figure that I've seen in many years.
All that remained was for Richard Dawkins to bake this idea into his book, The Selfish Gene, claiming that DNA replicates like a crystal, proteins are automatically formed from DNA templates, and so genes “created us, body and mind.” Biology became a determinate process, with DNA templates enabling RNAs to be formed that then enabled ribosomes to create amino acid sequences from the nucleotide sequences. There was no room for living cells themselves to orchestrate DNA replication. It became a purely chemical one-way process: DNA → RNA → PROTEIN, the basis of Crick’s Central Dogma.
I'm not a big fan of Dawkins' views, but at least I don't lie about them.
7 comments :
Denis Noble's comments have attracted the attention of many creationists, who treat him like a fellow traveler.
People seem to have a need to have organisms consciously involved in their own evolution. Let's go evolve this way! Let's go evolve that way! This is not only nonsense, it is based on Gaia-like notions that are not even wrong.
Also, last I heard, the Human Genome Project had not failed: it really did sequence the human genome.
Those WANTED! illustrations: are they in the IAI article (I can't read the whole thing, I am not a subscriber) or did you create them? they are really very funny :-)
I always hate myself a bit for taking the easy road, but I asked Grok if the HGP resulted in tangible benefits. The detailed answer amounted to Yes. Here I start to quote some of it:
"...has delivered substantial tangible benefits in medicine, diagnostics, research tools, forensics, agriculture, and the economy—far exceeding its roughly $3–5.6 billion (inflation-adjusted) public cost—while the most transformative medical applications continue to expand."
And ... "Thousands of disease genes identified .... This ends diagnostic odysseys for many families, informs counseling, and guides management. Examples include cystic fibrosis (CFTR gene knowledge leading to targeted drugs like ivacaftor and combination therapies effective for most patients) and spinal muscular atrophy therapies."
It goes on to describe improvements in cancer diagnosis and treatments, and that it has fairly launched the field of Pharmacogenomics. It continues for several more paragraphs, and includes a section that admits there were overstated promises about the speed of benefits coming in. So there is that.
Denis Noble et al are merely relying on science doubters to take them at their word, and of course there are far too many of those these days. But I guess Noble is still living in a pre-AI era, where the average person can very quickly check claims if they want to.
The simple answer is there's money in pushing this rubbish, just like there's money in pushing 'ancient civilisations/aliens built the pyramids/Göbekli Tepe/pretty much any other big ancient construction' or in 'alternative health. They don't let inconvenient facts to get in the way of the grift. In other words there is a good living to be made in telling a significant proportion of the public the experts don't know what they are talking about.
Perceptive students usually ask me how a scientific tenet could have ended up with such an unfortunate moniker as 'dogma'. The background story is interesting, because Crick himself later admitted he had chosen the wrong word, on account that he didn't really understand its meaning (although, in fairness, it was Monod who suggested him to use the word). A more appropriate choice could have been 'principle'.
More on point, perhaps Larry can explain why the Noble figure is the worst he's seen in years? Because it looks surprisingly similar to the one that Crick himself drew in the 1970 Nature paper (I can't paste the figure here but it's available in the article https://doi.org/10.1038/227561a0).
As for Noble, here is a debate between him and Dawkins, and although I do certainly disagree with Noble (I think he's mostly playing with semantics), I respect him for his scientific accomplishments, which are many, and for questioning some of the established ideas in biology. Science would probably not advance much if all scientists had Larry's monolithic stance and abrasiveness to people who disagree with his sometimes extremely fanciful positions. And worse of all, it would be awfully boring too. Incidentally, I am surprised by Dawkins's restraint and composure on this debate. At one point he even concedes "I can accept that, I'm not a dogmatist". Here goes the link in case watching two elderly Briton scholars debate for 25 minutes on the minutiae of heredity is someone's idea of a good time (Darwin himself would probably not even show up):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrJ6jDZRESQ
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