Questioning the Central Dogma of Genetics
From Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk. Man, I've been skeptical of the Central Dogma for years now (though, rather embarrassingly, I didn't know that's what it was called). Whenever I find myself in conversations with biologists I bring this up, causing them to start treating me like I'm some kind of creationist wacko or something. This is really exciting stuff. Gots to find out more!
From Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk. Man, I've been skeptical of the Central Dogma for years now (though, rather embarrassingly, I didn't know that's what it was called). Whenever I find myself in conversations with biologists I bring this up, causing them to start treating me like I'm some kind of creationist wacko or something. This is really exciting stuff. Gots to find out more!
posted by Winston Smith at
8:17 PM
4 Comments:
Wouldn't that be great if we started referring to more scientific beliefs as "dogmas?" It's so appropriate from a Kuhnian perspective. Like religious dogmas, the central tenets of the reigning scientific paradigm sort of prevent us from considering other possibilities or recognizing/grappling with anomalies. Perhaps it's helpful to openly acknowledge when one is "in the grip of a picture," or, more accurately, which picture one is in the grip of. (Apparently there's no way of not ending that last sentence with a preposition, or at least no acceptable way...)
That's a damn good idea, r. My first candidate: the dogma of efficient-causation-is-the-only-causation-alism.
Catchy, eh?
Winston, 2 quick points from a molecular biologist, to (I hope) clarify matters. 1) Crick coined the term "central dogma" as a joke and was quite embarrassed when it caught on. 2) The essence of the so-called "dogma" is simply that there is no mechanism for "reverse translation"- the information in amino acid sequences cannot directly flow "backward" into a corresponding nucleic acid base sequence. That remains as true as ever, and the kind of phenomenon described in the Nature paper is not an exception to it.
But hey, scientists offer their amateur peanut-gallery views on philosophy all the time, so you'e excused. ;)
Steve LaBonne has it (almost) exactly right. Crick's formulation of the central dogma bars the flow of "sequence information" from protein to nucleic acid AND from protein to protein. Prions _might_ violate this version of the central dogma, but we won't know until we've unravelled the mechanisms of prion replication. Similarly for the new findings reported in Nature. The mechanism's the thing...
In any case, Crick's version of the central dogma has yet to be successfully challenged -- in marked contrast to the bowdlerized version(s) of the dogma appearing in standard molecular biology textbooks. Such a shame that students are systematically mis-educated about the theoretical foundations of their discipline.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home