GENES, DEVELOPMENT, AND INDIVIDUALISM

I have already said that genes are crucial biological agents, and we have seen some classic expressions of the idea that they are particularly important agents for ontogenetic development. And I have suggested, along with Moss, that the computational and informational metaphors used to describe genes have inflated the role of genetic agency in development. They do so in part by facilitating a conception of genes as makers of their own destiny, a conception exemplified in one of the earliest uses of those metaphors in the physicist Erwin Schrödinger's influential What is Life? Genes, he claimed in a well-known passage, “are law-code and executive power – or, to use another simile, they are architect's plans and builder's craft – in one.” While Moss views the reliance on such metaphors as a confusion intimately tied to the melding of two distinct concepts of the gene, his Gene-P and Gene-D, I think that we should look elsewhere in trying to understand the limits to the computational and informational metaphors in genetics, particularly within developmental genetics.

Genes are sequences of DNA that serve as templates for the production of amino acids. These amino acids constitute the proteins that are the basic building blocks of biological structures and processes. By virtue of this and the correspondence between certain nucleotide triplets and specific amino acids, the former are said to code for the latter. This much talk of genetic coding is relatively uncontroversial: genes code for protein synthesis.