"the disappointment of the double helix"
The tiele of a provocative piece from James LeFanu in World...
From the time of Plato onwards, the grandeur of the universe and the richness of the living world spoke of a hidden reality beyond appearances and the reach of the human mind to comprehend fully.
This is scarcely the modern view, where for science the unknown is merely the waiting-to-be-known....Still, the paradox of this most impressive of recent intellectual achievements is that it forcefully brings to our attention what we can never know...
...since the discovery in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick of the double helix, the elegant simplicity of that structure has seduced us. We see the genetic instructions strung out along its two intertwining strands, and we suppose that the biological complexities of life might be made knowable....
From the mid-1970s onwards, the massive onslaught of modern genetics has promised to do just that...But paradoxically, as we now know, the composition of those genomes has turned out to be virtually the reverse of that anticipated...
posted by Eric Schansberg @ 6:02 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
The biologists were disappointed when "genomics" didn't tell them what makes species different, or how living things really operate at the molecular level. But they've learned that the real action is between the genes in the DNA (which only occupy about 3% of the genome). The sections of the genome between the genes contain DNA that controls when genes are turned on or off (promoted or inhibited), through a number of different mechanisms. This is what makes species different, and the biologists are now working hard to understand these things.
very interesting...
The double helix has left us with far more questions than answers, the ultimate question (unanswered by Evolution) being: What is the origin of Information itself?
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