Health Fetishism Among The Nacirema: A Fugue On Jenny Reardon’s The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, and Knowledge After The Genome (Chicago University Press, 2017) And Isabelle Stengers’ Another Science Is Possible: A Manifesto For Slow Science (Polity Press, 2018)

Personalized medicine has become a goal of genomics and of health policy makers. This article reviews two recent books that are highly critical of this approach, finding their arguments very thoughtful and important. According to Stengers, biology’s rush to become a science of genome sequences has made it part of the “speculative economy of promise.” Reardon claims that the postgenomic condition is the attempt to find meaning in all the troves of data that have been generated. The current paper attempts to extend these arguments by showing that scientific alternatives such as ecological developmental biology and the tissue organization field theory of cancer provide evidence demonstrating that genomic data alone is not sufficient to explain the origins of common disease. What does need to be explained is the intransience of medical scientists to recognize other explanatory models beside the “-omics” approaches based on computational algorithms. To this end, various notions of commodity and religious fetishism are used. This is not to say that there is no place for Big Data and genomics. Rather, these methodologies should have a definite place among others. These books suggest that Big Data genomics is like the cancer it is supposed to conquer. It has expanded unregulated and threatens to kill the body in which it arose

Ageing And Cancer As Diseases Of Epigenesis

Cancer and ageing are often said to be diseases of development. During the past fifty years, the genetic components of cancer and ageing have been intensely investigated since development, itself, was seen to be an epiphenomenon of the genome. However, as we have learned more about the expression of the genome, we find that differences in expression can be as important as differences in alleles. It is easier to inactivate a gene by methylation than by mutation, and given that appropriate methylation is essential for normal development, one can immediately see that diseases would result as a consequence of inappropriate epigenetic methylation. While first proposed by Boris Vanyushin in 1973, recent studies have confirmed that inappropriate methylation not only causes diseases, and it also may be the critical factor in ageing and cancers

Symbiosis As The Way Of Eukaryotic Life: The Dependent Co-Origination Of The Body

Molecular analyses of symbiotic relationships are challenging our biological definitions of individuality and supplanting them with a new notion of normal part whole relationships. This new notion is that of a \u27holobiont\u27, a consortium of organisms that becomes a functionally integrated \u27whole\u27. This holobiont includes the zoological organism (the \u27animal\u27) as well as its persistent microbial symbionts. This new individuality is seen on anatomical and physiological levels, where a diversity of symbionts form a new \u27organ system\u27 within the zoological organism and become integrated into its metabolism and development. Moreover, as in normal development, there are reciprocal interactions between the \u27host\u27 organism and its symbionts that alter gene expression in both sets of cells. The immune system, instead of being seen as functioning solely to keep microbes out of the body, is also found to develop, in part, in dialogue with symbionts. Moreover, the immune system is actively involved in the colonization of the zoological organism, functioning as a mechanism for integrating microbes into the animal-cell community. Symbionts have also been found to constitute a second mode of genetic inheritance, providing selectable genetic variation for natural selection. We develop, grow and evolve as multi-genomic consortia/teams/ecosystems

Second To The Right, Straight On \u27Til Morning

A response to Michael Ruse\u27s Bare-Knuckle Fighting: EvoDevo Versus Natural Selection

The Generation Of Novelty: The Province Of Developmental Biology

A response to Michael Ruse\u27s Forty Years A Philosopher Of Biology: Why EvoDevo Makes Me Still Excited About My Subject

Achilles And The Tortoise: Some Caveats To Mathematical Modeling In Biology

Mathematical modeling has recently become a much-lauded enterprise, and many funding agencies seek to prioritize this endeavor. However, there are certain dangers associated with mathematical modeling, and knowledge of these pitfalls should also be part of a biologist\u27s training in this set of techniques. (1) Mathematical models are limited by known science; (2) Mathematical models can tell what can happen, but not what did happen; (3) A model does not have to conform to reality, even if it is logically consistent; (4) Models abstract from reality, and sometimes what they eliminate is critically important; (5) Mathematics can present a Platonic ideal to which biologically organized matter strives, rather than a trial-and-error bumbling through evolutionary processes. This “Unity of Science” approach, which sees biology as the lowest physical science and mathematics as the highest science, is part of a Western belief system, often called the Great Chain of Being (or Scala Natura), that sees knowledge emerge as one passes from biology to chemistry to physics to mathematics, in an ascending progression of reason being purification from matter. This is also an informal model for the emergence of new life. There are now other informal models for integrating development and evolution, but each has its limitations