 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | There is the Richard Lewontin nonbiologists know, the author of acerbic, thoughtful, witty, unhesitatingly leftist books such as Not in Our Genes and the essays from The New York Review of Books collected in It Ain't Necessarily So. This is the other Lewontin, the hardcore scientist, one of the most insightful evolutionary biologists going. The Triple Helix is a manifesto for the life sciences: "The time has come when further progress in our understanding of nature requires that we reconsider the relationship between the outside and the inside, between organism and environment." Lewontin is not arguing for what he calls "obscurationist holism," but for a more complex interaction between gene, organism, and environment, in which they construct each other: .... It is the biology, indeed the genes, of an organism that determines its effective environment, by establishing the way in which external physical signals become incorporated into its reactions.... Whatever the autonomous processes of the outer world may be, they cannot be perceived by the organism. Its life is determined by the shadows on the wall, passed through a transforming medium of its own creation. Lewontin argues for a life science that faces up to reality, that tackles the problems of studying subtle processes in complex systems where three-dimensional shape is crucial. The journal Nature "cannot recommend [the book] too highly for the many commentators and headline writers who think that DNA is the blueprint for the organism"--or for their readers. --Mary Ellen Curtin |
Average Customer Rating:   clarifying This book places organisms in context. Indirectly, this helps an individual understand its own identity. One is not a cluster of genes and one is not the environment, although one would not exist without these.
A human is an organism. This book helps focus the reader's attention on this fact. Anti-genotype The effect of genes on an organism is complex. If one plots a phenotypic variable (e.g. height of an organism) as a function of an environmental variable (e.g. temperature) for a number of different genotypes, the result is in general a mishmash of nonlinear curves (pp. 20-25). Thus the respective influences of genes and environment on phenotype are hard to separate. Furthermore, randomness is a considerable factor in the development of an organism. E.g., insects often have very different number of sensory bristles on their right and left sides, which is clearly not attributable to genes or environment (p. 33). The development of the human brain also seems to depend crucially on randomness (p. 38).
One should not think of organisms as trying to "fit" the "given" environment. Instead, organisms create their own environment. The environment of a bird, for example, is best described in terms of the activities of the bird: it eats insects in the summer and switches seeds in the fall, it flies south in the winter, etc. (p. 52). Flies in a dry area are "actually living in small crevices and between leaves where the local humidity is high" (p. 53). Ants build nests, snails have shells, and humans and trees alike are surrounded by an atmosphere of their own creation (a strong wind cancels this out and reveals what the "given" environment is like) (p. 54). "Weeds are precisely those species which can grow only in disturbed conditions, roadsides, gardens, burned areas, harvested forests, and which, having grown, change the conditions of the area so that they cannot produce a second generation. ... [This] is a manifestation of a general principle...: that the conditions which make possible the coming into being of a state of the system are abolished by that state." (pp. 59-60). From my BeBoBio groups page My review from the BeBoBio groups page:
http://groups.google.com/group/bebobio?hl=en
Wow! I didn't know what to expect when I bought this book. It's a collection of four essays outlining Lewontin's views of the current limitations and commonly held misunderstandings in the biological sciences. The thing that initially interested me was part of the dust jacket review from the New York Times: "This is a tough, challenging, and rewarding book aimed at professional biologists to take account of what, Lewontin says, they all know already at some level of their consciousness"
The subtitle of the book is "gene, organism, and environment", hence, the "triple helix".
In the first three essays Lewontin gives a downbeat narrative of the failings and over-stated promise of the reductionist method in biology, which has typically focused on genomic data and the metaphor of an organism as a machine programmed by DNA. I see where he's coming from, and he raises some valid points, but I think his almost total rejection of the "organism as machine" metaphor is misplaced. It seems to me that although the metaphor is not perfect, it's close enough to be fruitful.
In the final essay, Lewontin does the right thing, and instead of merely critiquing science as it is currently done, offers a helpful suggestion. He states, "It is useless to call in general terms for some more synthetic approach or to say that somehow we need a new insight". He offers actionable, specific ideas on ways to stimulate a novel point of view.
I'm reminded of an old saying: "When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". To paraphrase the point of Lewontin's book, I would say we need to remind ourselves that genomics and the techniques of molecular biology are not our only tools. Interesting book: OTHER things than DNA structure our lives This an interesting book by an author who, pretty much, stopped writing when he completed his message.
His main message is that DNA is not the be-all and end-all when it comes to the structure of life. Other important factors are the conditions within the organism's cell (including what chemicals are present, and how the DNA folds), what the organism's environment is, and how the organism changes that environment.
Lewontin worries that because scientists can now easily analyze and manipulate genetic structure, scientists will overemphasize research on the DNA structure itself, leaving other important and significant biology unstudied.
The author also points out that while dramatic mutations are chosen to study mutations, many mutations aren't so dramatic, and that some of the "dramatic mutations" are in fact the combination of several lesser mutations.
The writing is unnecessarily complex in places, including one passage where the author claims "Causal claims are usually ceteris paribus, but in biology all other things are almost never equal." How many readers recognize the Latin phrase "ceteris paribus" ? The author also buys into the duality so common in discourse: _either_ DNA is the only important thing, _or_ DNA is a minor side-issue. What happened to the middle road? Excellent non technical overview Ok, so my review will be short. I believe this book is excelent since it accomplish to set clear why genetic determinism is wrong. Genes do not act by their own, they do so inside a cell which (at least in multicelular organisms) is just one more in millions (being that a prudent estimate to a small organism) whith whom it comunicates. Now, this is just part of the story, you still have to consider this organism lives in a specific habitat in which it develops (crucial step) and in which it feeds, moves (if it can), etc. So utimately genes are a full orchestra directed by surroundings. I highly recomend this book to anyone interested in Molecular Biology, Genetics or Developmental Biology, it is basic but esential. |  |
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