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  • From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Genetics Is Giving Way to a New Science of Life
  • Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2017 01:18:16 -0400

Genetics Is Giving Way to a New Science of Life
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/genetics-is-giving-way-to-a-new-science-of-life/

Genetics Is Giving Way to a New Science of Life
<https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/genetics-is-giving-way-to-a-new-science-of-life/>
February 6, 2017 Commentaries
<https://www.independentsciencenews.org/sections/commentaries/>, Health
<https://www.independentsciencenews.org/sections/health/> 14 Comments

by Jonathan Latham, PhD

Test your understanding of the living world with this simple question. *What
kind of biomolecule is found in all living organisms?* If your answer is
“DNA”, you are incorrect. The mistake is very forgiveable though. The
standard English-language biology education casts DNA (DeoxyriboNucleic
Acid) as the master molecule of life, coordinating and controlling most, if
not all, living functions. This master molecule concept is popular. It is
plausible. It is taught in every university and high school. But it is
wrong. DNA is no master controller, nor is it even at the centre of
biology. Instead, science overwhelmingly shows that life is self-organised
and thus the pieces are in place for biology to undergo the ultimate
paradigm shift.
The mythologising of DNA

Highly respected scientists make very strong claims for the powers of DNA.
In his autobiography, Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis called it “The King of
molecules” and “The big one”. Maybe he read *DNA: The Secret of Life*, a
popular science book that calls DNA the molecule that “holds the key to the
very nature of living things”. Its author should know. He is Nobel
Laureate, James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. Even
institutions have strong opinions when it comes to DNA; the website of the
US National Institutes of Health claims “Genes are at the center of
everything that makes us human”.

My edition of *The Secret of Life* features on its back cover Eric Lander.
Lander is the celebrated brains behind modern human genetics. He is also
the head of the Broad Institute <https://www.broadinstitute.org/> at MIT.
In his blurb, Lander endorses “The secret of life” trope. Just below him on
the jacket is Professor of genetics Mary-Claire King. She writes: “This is
the story of DNA and therefore the story of life, history, sex, money,
drugs, and still-to-be-revealed secrets.” According to Prof. King, *DNA is
life*.

The Watson view of genetics dominates education too. The standard US high
school biology textbook “*Life*“, of which we own the 1997 edition, frames
the entirety of biology around DNA, thereby giving it the biochemical
status of life’s centrepiece.
[image: Phytoplankton]

Phytoplankton (Image Credit: CodeCarvings)

Meanwhile, Francis Collins, longstanding head of the National Institutes of
Health, has published bestselling books about DNA with titles like *The
Language of Life* and the *Language of God*. It should be no surprise then
that the idea of DNA as a master molecule is one of the dominant ideas of
our age.

Some biologists will say that these views are extreme and unrepresentative.
They are, and part of this article is to explain why extreme views about
DNA dominate the public discourse. But its main purpose is to contrast the
portrayal of DNA by virtually all biologists with the narrow scientific
treatment they apply to other biological molecules. Our existence also
depends on proteins, fats, carbohydrates and RNA (Ribonucleic Acid); but no
one says “it’s in my protein”. But here is a question: is it any less
scientifically preposterous to say something “is in my DNA”?

To take a ruthless look at that question is thus the purpose of this
article. Does DNA have *any* claim to being in control? Or at the centre of
biological organisation?

The answer is that DNA is none of the things Watson, Lander, and Collins
claim, and that even the standard nuanced biologist’s view of life is
wrong. This is provable in many ways but mainly by a new science of life
that is emerging from almost complete obscurity. This new science explains
the features of living beings in productive new ways that DNA-centric,
genetic determinist, biology has not, and cannot. DNA is not the language
of God. It is not even the language of biology.
Organisms are systems

The evidence that DNA is not a biological controller begins with the fact
that biological organisms are complex systems. Outside of biology, when we
consider any complex system, such as the climate, or computers, or the
economy, we would not normally ask whether one component has primacy over
all the others. We consider it obvious that complex systems are composed of
subsystems, each being necessary for the larger whole. Each subsystem has
its specific niche but no one subsystem exerts a privileged level of
causation.

The same applies to living organisms. At the level of the physiology of an
individual organism we do not apply an exclusive or special causative role
to the heart, the liver, the skin, or the brain, because a body is a
system. All parts are necessary.

At the smaller biological scales of organs too, distinct cell types
maintain, operate, and repair themselves and each other. Similarly, at the
cellular level, no one disagrees that organelles and other molecular
structures are interacting but independent subparts of the whole.

At the level of macromolecules, however, a curious thing happens.
Biologists abandon systems thinking entirely. Instead, we apply the famous
central dogma of biology, which is that DNA makes RNA makes Protein (Crick,
1970
<http://cs.brynmawr.edu/Courses/cs380/fall2012/CrickCentralDogma1970.pdf>).
This formulation creates an origin story that begins with DNA.

The first mistake of the dogma, however, is to call it “central”. If an
organism is a system, then there is no centre. The second error is that the
pathway described is factually incorrect. The pathway should be a loop
since the DNA does not come from nowhere: to make every DNA molecule
requires proteins and RNA and DNA. More broadly, the synthesis of DNA
cannot be done without a whole cell, just as the making of any RNA or any
protein also takes a whole cell.

If we wanted to be more accurate still, we would say it takes a whole
organism to make each of these components. Even this description would be
incomplete, since, undeniably, it takes an ecosystem, including, in the
case of humans, a gut microbiota and a food supply. The full formulation of
the central dogma is therefore a loop embedded in a web. But the central
dogma taught to millions of students every year takes an entirely different
intellectual path. It arbitrarily confers on DNA a special place: firstly,
by not closing the loop, and second, by placing DNA at its beginning. The
central dogma is thus merely a representation formed from arbitrarily
constructed boundaries. It is not biological reality.

Geneticists, and sometimes other biologists, make this linear
interpretation seem plausible, not with experiments—since their results
contradict it—but by using highly active verbs in their references to DNA.
DNA, according to them, “controls”, “governs”, and “regulates” cellular
processes, while nouns like “expression” are also commonly used to ascribe
functions to DNA. Biologists thus confer activist and willful superpowers
on DNA. Ultimately, this can create circular arguments. DNA controls
embryonic development or organism health because genes express themselves.
QED.

However, there is no specific science that demonstrates that DNA plays the
dominant role these words imply. Quite the opposite. For example, a recent
publication in *Nature* magazine posited “An emerging consensus that much
of the protein constituent of the cell is buffered against transcriptional
variation. ” i.e. is insulated from direct genetic quantitative
influence (Chick
et al., 2016
<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v534/n7608/abs/nature18270.html>).
This buffering is nicely demonstrated by many experiments. One is the
demonstration that the circadian rhythm of a bacterium can be reproduced,
in the absence of any DNA, by just three proteins mixed together in a test
tube. The rhythm was maintained for three days, even in the face of
temperature changes (Nakajima et al., 2005
<https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hideo_Iwasaki/publication/7904923_Reconstitution_of_Circadian_Oscillation_of_Cyanobacterial_KaiC_Phosphorylation_in_Vitro/links/0fcfd50a250d9def5c000000/Reconstitution-of-Circadian-Oscillation-of-Cyanobacterial-KaiC-Phosphorylation-in-Vitro.pdf>
).

Inevitably, any language used to describe DNA will necessarily be
metaphorical and be of limited accuracy, but words like “govern” and
“control” literally invent attributes for DNA (Noble, 2003). A much more
precise metaphor for DNA would compare it to the library of Congress, since
cells use DNA primarily as a storehouse of information. Consider that
biologists could apply more neutral verbs such as “use”, as in “cells use
DNA to create proteins”. If so, they would have created a very different
status for DNA. Only librarians would have T-shirts saying “its in my DNA”.

If we shed the wild metaphors and the central dogma, a more accurate way to
think about biology emerges. If every molecule and every subsystem,
regardless of scale, constrains and potentiates the other parts, then there
is no need to infer a central controller. We can replace the DNA-centric
model of biology with a relational model of complex interplay of feedback
systems and emergent properties, of which the library of DNA is just one
component. In this model, RNA is simply one of the inputs needed to make
proteins and DNA is just one of the inputs needed to make RNA, and so on.
Unlike the central dogma, such a proposition is consistent with the known
facts of biology.

The formulation encapsulated by the central dogma and by biology textbooks
is therefore an illusion. They are a classic case of what microbiologist
Carl Woese has called the “reductionist fundamentalism”. Reductionist
fundamentalism differs from simple reductionism in that whereas simple
reductionism is a valid scientific method, the former is an ideological
preference for a simplistic explanation when a more holistic one is better
supported by the evidence. In this case, the assigning of superpowers to
DNA to explain observed biological activities when a better explanation
would accept that many biochemical events have multiple causes and
contributors. Oxford physiologist Denis Noble describes this fallacy as
conferring on DNA “a privileged level of causation”.
If not DNA, is there a “molecule of life”?

Many plant-infecting viruses lack DNA. They base their lifecycles on
protein and they use RNA as their heritable material.

There are also plant pathogens, called viroids, that lack both DNA and
protein. Viroids are thus composed solely of non-coding RNA. Lifeforms can
therefore exist without either DNA or proteins—but there are none that that
lack RNA.

Therefore, the answer to the opening question: “what kind of biomolecule is
possessed by all living organisms?” is RNA. RNA stands for Ribonucleic Acid
and for many reasons it is a better candidate for being a universal
biomolecule than DNA.

RNA and DNA are chemically very similar. Even scientists confuse them, but
their modest chemical distinctions confer very different properties. RNA is
structurally very flexible (bendy), whereas DNA is highly inflexible; RNA
is unstable and chemically reactive, whereas DNA is highly inert. A key
difference is the number of chemical modifications that cells are able make
to their four bases. In the case of DNA (whose bases are the nucleotides
A,C,G and T), just two modifications are possible in most cells. These
modifications are called methylation and acetylation. These two
modifications alter the properties of DNA bases and they are the primary
basis of the fashionable science of epigenetics.

RNA also has four bases (A, C, G, and U). But cells make more than one
hundred comparable chemical modifications to them. The roles of these
modifications are essentially a mystery, but presumably they help RNA
perform its many cellular tasks.

RNA is also misunderstood. In a typical human cell, less than 1% of it
makes proteins. The remaining 99% has a huge variety of structural,
regulatory, and enzymatic functions. Most biologists though might as well
be slaves to the central dogma in thinking that RNA is just the
intermediate between DNA and protein. Only recently has RNA begun emerging
from the shadow of DNA as a far more interesting molecule.

The deep explanation of these molecular differences is that RNA existed
long before DNA. RNA probably predated even the invention of cells. It is
enormously old. In consequence, it is so deeply and structurally embedded
in living systems that it is very hard to study. Thus the paradoxical
reason why we don’t know much about RNA is not because it is unimportant,
but because, unlike DNA, RNA is too important to cell function to
selectively remove at will.

Consequently, to conform with current evolutionary understanding, we should
really invert standard teaching and insist that the proper way to think
about DNA is that it is a specialised form of RNA. DNA evolved structural
rigidity and chemical inertness to make itself a more staid librarian for
the safe storing of heritable information.

So, over evolutionary time DNA was chosen as a better librarian (this
library metaphor originates with Colin Tudge and his excellent book Why DNA
isn’t selfish and people are nice
<http://www.florisbooks.co.uk/book/Colin-Tudge/Why+Genes+Are+Not+Selfish+and+People+Are+Nice/9780863159633>);
proteins turned out to be superior catalysts of chemical reactions; but RNA
is more likely to have been the biomolecule around which life was really
built. But RNA is no more a controller than is DNA.
Nor is DNA the centre of evolution

A common explanation for organising biology around DNA, and the one given
by the authors of “*Life*“, the textbook, is DNA’s supposed role in the
theory of evolution. For two reasons this explanation is highly
questionable, however. Both reasons exemplify pervasive misunderstandings
of the theory of evolution. One of these misunderstandings exaggerates the
significance of Darwin’s theory and the second, once again, gives to DNA
credit it doesn’t deserve.

The first misunderstanding is to assume that evolutionary theory is an
explanation of life. Life, however, began long before Darwinian evolution
and some of its fundamental patterns (cells, proteins, energy metabolism)
emerged—so far as we can tell—long before DNA became the molecule of
heredity (Carter, 2016). This distinction is important. In a textbook about
“*Life*“, for example, it is important to separate the origin of life from
its maintenance so as not to unhelpfully exaggerate (i.e. confuse) what
Darwin’s theory explains; but in conflating the two, “*Life*” is only
reflecting the misunderstanding of most biologists.

Second, the pre-Darwinian life of cells and metabolism arose thanks to the
fact that complex systems have emergent and self-organising properties
(e.g. Kauffman, 1993; Carter, 2016). The advent of DNA into these systems
allowed Darwinian evolution to accelerate, but it did not eradicate
emergent and self-organising properties. Rather, it colluded with them and
helped create new ones. This means such properties are the likeliest
explanation of large areas of biology. “Self-organization proposes what
natural selection disposes” is how Batten and colleagues quaintly summarise
alternatives to standard evolutionary theory which is pretty much rigidly
genetic determinist (Batten et al., 2008
<https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Fabio_Boschetti/publication/228617818_Visions_of_Evolution_Self-organization_Proposes_What_Natural_Selection_Disposes/links/53f446f70cf256ab87b7a84d.pdf>
).

A classic emergent property is the folding of proteins. DNA encodes the
linear sequence of amino acids that constitute proteins, but every protein
adopts one (or usually more) highly complex three dimensional shape (Munson
et al., 1996 <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.5560050813/pdf>).
These shapes, along with charge and solubility, are largely responsible for
a protein’s properties. It is habitually, but lazily, presumed that DNA
specifies all the information necessary for the formation of a protein, but
that is not true. All protein shapes depend also on the integration of
multiple sources of information. These sources include temperature, other
cellular molecules like water and mineral ions, pH, energy molecules like
ATP, protein folding aids called chaperones, and so forth. Beyond this,
many proteins have functions, such as to be molecular channels and pumps,
that emerge only at higher levels of structure, such as in the presence of
other proteins.

Thus DNA specifies proteins and their functions only up to a very limited
point. It is possible to disregard all such non-genetic contributions and
ascribe to DNA all the properties of a protein or a process (or a whole
organism). Most scientists do, but doing so is an ultra-determinist
position. It writes emergent properties, such as protein folding, entirely
out of the functioning of life. It again confers onto DNA superpowers it
does not have.

Emergent properties are only one example of why the relationship between
DNA and evolution is much more tenuous than is normally portrayed. Patrick
Bateson of Cambridge University, whose perspective is not emergent
properties but animal behaviour, explained evolution much more accurately
than most when he wrote: “Whole organisms survive and reproduce
differentially and the winners drag their genotypes with them. This is the
engine of Darwinian evolution
<http://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/jbsc/030/01/0031-0039>“.

Thus we can explain why Charles Darwin invented his theory of evolution
without knowing DNA even existed, because, even for evolution, DNA still is
not “The big one”, but it is standard for biologists to teach that DNA is
more important to evolution than any other component of living organisms.
Explaining genocentric biology

When Dorothy journeyed to the Emerald City she discovered that The Wizard
of Oz
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Wizard_of_Oz#Allusions_to_19th-century_America>
was only “a common man”. He was devoid of magic powers and so could not
help her friends. But there was at least something behind the facade. The
same is true for DNA.

Most cellular molecules are highly reactive and transient chemical
substances. That means they are difficult to extract, and hard to study. So
it is with RNA and proteins.

DNA, however, is a much more practical point of intervention in biology. It
is stable and robust and simple enough to be isolated on a reproducible
basis and copied precisely. With an hour of training, high school students
can do it. With a bit more training, DNA can be altered and, in some
species, replaced. Hence the alarm over garage hacking of DNA.

This explains, in a nutshell, why our understanding of gene regulatory
networks runs far ahead of our understanding of other disciplines of
biology. It is because DNA is the low hanging fruit of biology.
Scientific dissent around DNA

“The human body completely changes the matter it is made of roughly every 8
weeks, through metabolism, replication and repair. Yet, you’re still you
–with all your memories, your personality… If science insists on chasing
particles, they will follow them right through an organism and miss the
organism entirely.” mathematical biologist Robert Rosen is supposed to have
said. And indeed, examine any multicellular organism and concealed under
its relatively calm surface are circulatory systems, churning stomachs,
lymphatic drainage systems, electrical impulses, biomolecular machines and
so forth.

These systems cause every part of an organism to continuously move,
contract, twist, vibrate, strain and grow. What defines living organisms,
in the final analysis, is their dynamic and animate nature. This is why,
when we want to know if an organism has legally died we don’t examine its
DNA, we measure its heartbeat or brain function. Animate properties require
animate components, like RNA and proteins.

Yet by organizing our understanding of life largely around DNA (recall
Mary-Claire King’s “DNA is life”), biologists have curiously chosen the
cellular constituent that is probably the least representative of life’s
dynamic nature.

For this reason there are dissenters in biology. Some are prominent. Some
are not. They all have questioned whether biology is not much more complex
and interesting than our present DNA-based framing can make room for (e.g.
Kaufman, 1993; Strohman, 1997; <http://harveybialy.org/files/kuhn.pdf>Rose,
1999; Woese 2004; Annila and Baverstock 2014; Friston et al., 2015).

These dissenters like to note, for example, the general absence of
medico-scientific breakthroughs following the sequencing of the human
genome and the ever-more-detailed-analysis-of-tiny-scraps-of-human-DNA
<https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-great-dna-data-deficit/>
(Ioannidis, 2007 <http://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/103512>; Dermitzakis
and Clark, 2009 <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2933170/>;
Manolio
et al., 2009 <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831613/>).

Some go much further in their critiques than others. Carl Woese, perhaps
the best known bacteriologist since Pasteur, argued before his death that
genetic determinism is a dead end, its vision of biology is “spent” (Woese,
2004 <http://mmbr.asm.org/content/68/2/173.full>).

There perhaps is no finer example of this than the field of tissue
engineering. Tissue engineers claim to have made “incredible” progress
making whole human organs in vitro for transplanting and other medical
uses, yet these organs are all non-functional (Badylak, 2016
<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v540/n7632_supp/full/540S55a.html>).
They don’t have blood vessels or immune systems or nerve networks, they are
just human cells on an ear-shaped scaffold or a hand-shaped scaffold and
so, among their many deficiencies, they are short-lived because they have
no regenerative properties.

Many biologists suspect at least part of this paradigm problem, but they
rarely act on it. The sole noticeable official response to the obvious fact
that organisms are highly complex systems has been to shovel modest funding
in the direction of ‘systems biology’.

One is bound to note that even this systems biology is rarely the study of
systems. Instead, biologists have overwhelmingly used systems biology funds
not to further the understanding of complex systems but to scale up and
mechanise their reductionism.

Thus no scientific specialism or institution has articulated the profound
inadequacy of viewing organisms as collections of gene regulatory networks
or moved towards assembling an alternative paradigm (or paradigms) to
replace it (Strohman, 1997 <http://harveybialy.org/files/kuhn.pdf>).

This intellectual near-vacuum is nevertheless being steadily filled by
individual scientists, mostly on the margins, with promising, even
revolutionary, theoretical developments and experimental findings that
explain biological phenomena in ways that transcend genetics.
A short guide to alternative paradigms of life

A Helmholtz machine is a sensory device that makes a prediction about
reality and crosschecks it against that reality. It then estimates the
difference between the two. Bayesian statistics is a mathematical method of
doing the same: estimating differences between expectation and reality.

A new theory of neurobiology, called the Bayesian brain theory, proposes
that the brain is the biological equivalent of these (reviewed in Clark,
2013
<http://users.monash.edu/%7Enaotsugt/Tsuchiya_Labs_Homepage/Bryan_Paton_files/Commentary%20.pdf>).
Brains make predictions, measure the mismatches with their expectations and
pass those mismatches up to higher neural circuits. These higher circuits
repeat the process and if mismatches persist then these are passed on to
yet ‘higher’ mental levels.

The Bayesian brain hypothesis is quite new and predictive neurons might
seem superficially improbable, yet the hypothesis appears to explain
numerous aspects of brain structure and brain function; for example, how
the brain can treat widely different stimuli (visual, sensual, oral, aural,
etc.) essentially with the same neural mechanisms and structures. It also
appears to show how the brain can integrate action and perception. The
theory also provides a substantive explanation of learning: learning is the
updating of the predictive model. The Bayesian brain hypothesis may even
explain how brains evolved higher levels of consciousness over evolutionary
time periods: by adding new layers of prediction.

A particular strength of the Bayesian brain hypothesis is that it
corresponds to the actual spatial organisation of neurons in the primate
cortex in which ranks of “predictive” neurons and “sensory” neurons send
signals in opposing directions which lets them cancel each other out
(except for the mismatches).

The structure-based predictive learning system proposed by the Bayesian
brain hypothesis is of interest here because it relegates detailed genetic
explanations of many phenomena, including arguably all consciousness, to
the margins (Friston, 2010 <http://swarma.org/thesis/doc/jake_343.pdf>).
Genes and proteins may fill in the details but many of the key elements of
brain function: learning, action, and perception, derive primarily from
structure alone. I.e., like protein folding, they are emergent properties
of organisation.

Emergent properties are equally important in other areas of biology. An
example is the vascular system of plants. Trees can transport water from
unsaturated sources hundreds of feet into the air. Transpiration, as it is
called, requires no energy input. Rather, it takes advantage purely
physical properties of hydrophilic xylem tissues (tubes) and the properties
of water itself. Without transpiration, which already operates, but only
very weakly, in soils, plants could not exceed a couple of inches in
height, nor tolerate dry conditions (Wheeler and Stroock, 2008
<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7210/full/nature07226.html>).
Thus, the defining characteristic of plants (apart from photosynthesis) is
their clever exploitation of a simple physical property of water.

A further example is the arches of the human foot. These are longitudinal
and transverse diaphragms composed of bone and connective tissue whose
emergent property is both to dissipate forces at impact and operate as
springs to transfer energy from impact into forward motion. Arches reduce
the energy needed to walk or run.

In the discipline of biochemistry, a recent development is the proposed
existence of metabolons. Metabolons are three-dimensional spatial
arrangements of enzymes. Metabolons explain how the product of an
ostensibly minor metabolic pathway can nevertheless constitute 30% of the
weight of a seedling and so drive away pests (Laursen et al., 2017
<https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jean-Etienne_Bassard/publication/310480074_Characterization_of_a_dynamic_metabolon_producing_the_defense_compound_dhurrin_in_sorghum/links/582f58fc08ae102f072f349b.pdf>
).

A more conventional class of self-organising properties found in biology
are homeostatic feedback loops. They too are phenomena largely independent
of gene functions with key roles in explaining the activities and
properties of living organisms. The three proteins noted earlier that can
recreate a bacterial circadian rhythm are just one example (Nakajima et
al., 2005).

At more elemental and universal levels of life are unifying theories of
cells and metabolism, many of which relate life to the operation of
fundamental physical forces. The father of all such theories was
arguably Nicolas
Rashevsky <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Rashevsky>, who died in
1972. He is survived by his students Robert Rosen and AH Louie. Others
include physicist Erwin Schrödinger, author of “*What is life?*“; Stuart
Kauffman, author of “*The Origins of Order*” (1993); Steven Rose “*Lifelines:
Biology beyond determinism*” (1997); Enrico Coen “*The Art of Genes*”
(1999); Denis Noble, “*The Music of Life*” (2003) and Dance to the Tune of
Life: Biological Relativity (2017); and Annila and Baverstock who argue
life is the inevitable outcome of the second law of thermodynamics (Annila
and Baverstock, 2014
<http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/94/20131017.short>; see
also Friston et al., 2015
<http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/12/105/20141383>). These,
and other omitted thinkers, have gone far in assembling the potential raw
material for a scientific revolution. One that leaves the framework of gene
regulatory networks far behind.

The closest that of any of these theories come to definitively falsifying
genetic determinism as a life-concept, however, would be a theory of the
origin of life itself that positions metabolism at the centre.

Readers may be familiar with the concept of the RNA world, which is
theorised to have predated the supposed “modern DNA world”. But more
convincing than an RNA world, for which there is little evidence, is a new
theory, the peptide-RNA world.

The central piece of evidence of the peptide-RNA origin thesis (Carter,
2016) is that the enzyme (called aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase) that nowadays
links RNA to proteins—and which therefore connects the RNA world to the
protein world—comes in two basic forms (in all organisms). The evolutionary
origin of these two forms (called Class I and Class II enzymes), however,
is strangely irreconcilable. Class I and II molecules perform almost
identical functions (though with different amino acids) yet have nothing
structurally in common. Except for one thing. Their most conserved
aminoacids, those at their active catalytic centre, can be derived from
opposite strands of the same small RNA molecule (Carter 2016). In other
words, the two proteins that let RNA make all modern proteins are derived
from opposite strands of a single very primitive small RNA molecule that
encoded them both.

The implication of this compelling observation is to intimately link
metabolism and replication at a very early stage of life’s origins. RNA was
the assembler of primitive proteins and the purpose of those proteins was
catalysis, i.e. to guide and enhance metabolism. What the peptide-RNA
origin thesis therefore does is to replaces the RNA world—which is a
replication-first theory—with a metabolism-first theory in that RNA is
enhancing a metabolism that already predated it.
DNA and politics

“Human biology is actually far more complicated than we imagine. Everybody
talks about the genes that they received from their mother and father, for
this trait or the other. But in reality, those genes have very little
impact on life outcomes. Our biology is way too complicated for that and
deals with hundreds of thousands of independent factors. Genes are
absolutely not our fate. They can give us useful information about the
increased risk of a disease, but in most cases they will not determine the
actual cause of the disease, or the actual incidence of somebody getting
it. Most biology will come from the complex interaction of all the proteins
and cells working with environmental factors, not driven directly by the
genetic code”. (Anand et al., 2008
<http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11095-008-9661-9>)

This quotation, spoken (but not written), by Craig Venter, the legendary
genome sequencer, suggests that even many geneticists secretly appreciate a
clear need for alternative paradigms.

At the same time the Venter quote prompts a deep question: *How is it that,
if organisms are the principal objects of biological study, and the
standard explanation of their origin and operation is so scientifically
weak that it has to award DNA imaginary superpowers of “expression” and
“control” to paper over the cracks, have scientists nevertheless clung to
it?*

Why is it that, rather than celebrating and investing in Rashevsky,
Kauffman, Noble, et al., as pioneers of necessary and potentially fruitful
and unifying paradigms, have these researchers been ignored by mainstream
biology?

What is the big attraction of genetic determinism?

A compelling and non-intuitive explanation for the monomania of biology
does exist. It is set out in a second and forthcoming article: *The Meaning
of Life*. It is an explanation that requires going behind the window
dressing of science and examining its active and symbiotic relation to
power in modern political systems.
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  • [permaculture] Genetics Is Giving Way to a New Science of Life, Lawrence London, 03/21/2017

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