What Genes Can't Do (Basic Bioethics)

Rating:
Summary: Moss has done it again!
Review: If you`re not a gene enthusiast before reading this, you will be. This is detailed, informative, and eye-opening. I will be assigning this as required reading for all my students this year.

Rating:
Summary: Important things to say, good though not a light summer read
Review: Note: I asked a professor who researches cell membranes and genetics to read the book, and he did not feel that it was helpful. Too much philosophy, he says, and too little useful science.

From July, 2003: Not for the faint of heart, this book is dense and challenging, though only 199 pages. Nevertheless, Moss makes a case and seems to defend it pretty well. I have read nothing before from Moss or others of the epigenetic programme, nor am I a professional biologist, but I have new respect for the context within which the DNA text is read. At the end of the introductory chapter, I thought that Moss was deeply into the bogus scientist critic wannabe camp of "Science Studies". But in Chapter 2, he examines Doyle and his science studies and finds them shallow and lacking in an explanatory programme. Thumbs up. Then I thought he was going to use Stuart Kauffman and his non-linear dynamics as a order-developing crutch to hobble away from the genome, but he examines Kauffman and concludes that that's no help either. Second thumbs up.

So if I were Moss, I would have been clearer in the intro about not being in those camps. Also his polemics border on strident, but what he ends up saying is "Look, genes can't do it in a vacuum. And there are heritable structures that provide the context around DNA which also shape DNA expression based on the environment and the signals from the rest of the multicellular organism." So he is only attacking people who look at the gene to the exclusion of all else biological. And who really does that? Even Daniel Dennett, the grand philosopher of "Darwinism all the way down" acknowledges that the text is only good in its context.

Maybe Dawkins in his own polemic frenzies gets too extreme.

Nevertheless, Moss shows how a too strict adherence to a "gene uber alles" viewpoint has prevented researchers from seeing other explanatory possibilities. Good examples of where in cancer research theoreticians have had to back away from sweeping claims in the 1980s in the face of contradictory evidence. I haven't gotten to the last chapter yet, but a good read so far.

As far as the other reviewer who will assign this book for his classes, most of his students will hate the big words and deep ideas, but the serious thinkers will say, hey, he's got some good points here.