Life: The Leading Edge of Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Anthropology, and Environmental Science by John Brockman

Author:John Brockman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-04-18T14:00:00+00:00

9

The Gene-Centric View: A Conversation

Richard Dawkins & J. Craig Venter

[January 23, 2008]

Introduction by John Brockman

It’s not every day you have Richard Dawkins and Craig Venter on a stage together. Richard Dawkins is responsible for possibly the most important science book of the last century, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, which set forth an agenda of the gene-centric, or gene’s-eye-view of life, which has become the basic science agenda for biologists for the last quarter century. And without that worldview, you wouldn’t have Craig Venter changing the world the way he is today. Venter led the private group that decoded the human genome in 2001. He’s working on the forefront of artificial life, synthetic biology. He’s traveling around the world on a sailboat, finding millions of new genes in the oceans. Most recently, his lab was responsible for transplanting the information from one genome into another. In other words, your dog becomes your cat. What we’ll present first is a conversation between Craig and Richard, and then they will entertain questions.

The Gene-Centric View: A Conversation

RICHARD DAWKINS: I thought I’d begin by reading a quotation from a famous philosopher and historian of science from the 1930s, Charles Singer, to give an idea of exactly how much things have changed. And Craig Venter is a leader—perhaps the leader—in making that change today. Here is Singer, in 1931: “Despite interpretations to the contrary, the theory of the gene is not a ‘mechanist’ theory. The gene is no more comprehensible as a chemical or physical entity than is the cell or, for that matter, the organism itself. . . . If I ask for a living chromosome, that is, for the only effective kind of chromosome, no one can give it to me except in its living surroundings any more than he can give me a living arm or leg. The doctrine of the relativity of functions is as true for the gene as it is for any of the organs of the body. They exist and function only in relation to other organs. Thus the last of the biological theories leaves us where the first started, in the presence of a power called life, or psyche, which is not only of its own kind but unique in each and all of its exhibitions.” You couldn’t ask for a more comprehensive destruction of a conventional view than that. That is not just wrong, it is catastrophically, utterly, stupefyingly wrong. It’s wrong in an interesting way, and Craig is the best person to tell us what’s wrong with all that.

J. CRAIG VENTER: I feel like this is a quiz, Richard [laughter]. Richard’s book The Selfish Gene influenced most thinking in modern biology. I actually didn’t like his book, initially—I’ve never told him that. But I’ve come to appreciate it immensely. I was looking at the world from a genome-centric view—the collection of genes put together to lead to any one species—but as we traveled around the world trying to look at the diversity of biology, we came up with larger and larger collections of genes.

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