Are We the Machine of Selfish Genes?
I remember the time when I read Matt Ridley’s “Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters”. It was in the mid 2000s and I was an enthusiastic biology student! Human life explained in 23 chapters! Isn’t that amazing?!! The book tells stories about genes in each chromosome which are “correlated” to specific phenotype (physical manifestation as seen in living individuals). For example, certain genes are said to affect people’s simple features such as height, eye color, and also complicated features such as intelligence and susceptibility to diseases. As an undergraduate biology student, I was so excited to read that book and remember how I discussed this with my science-enthusiast friend Arief Pambudi on our way back to kos2an or between classes and praktikum! “Udah baca yang gen SRY belum? Keren banget itu mekanismenya” Haha. The hype also triggered my philosophical self to wonder “are well all determined by our genes? do we have free will?”
Indeed, genomics was hype in 2000s. The Human Genome Project was announced by the US President, Bill Clinton, who said that it was “the language of God”. The speech was written and reviewed by a religious geneticist Francis Collins but the project itself was supported by entrepreunerial scientist, Craig Venter. People were so excited about what would happen next. We had been able to sequence the first draft of the genome (at the time, it was not fully a complete draft though), so we must have been closer to unlock the mystery of life!
Well..20 years later…which is yes, now..we have moved no where closer at all! As I read the book “How Life Works” by Philip Ball, it turned out that biologists are discovering more and more questions instead of answers. The quest of understanding life is not like composing a puzzle, but it’s like opening up a russian doll with infinite layers. Every specific phenotype is not determined by one gene, it must be polygenes. And when I write poly — it doesn’t mean several genes, but it could be more, dozens of them. Scientists call this “omnigenics”. I also remember the statement that less than 5%? of our genes were “functional”. It is proven that this statement is wrong. There is no such thing of “junk DNA”, we just don’t know their functions yet and it is predicted that they play a crucial role in genetic regulations, — which is a very important part of how our body operates. And scientists even found out that the basic dogma of biology, genes-RNA transcription-PNA translation to protein might not be fully true. Specific RNA code that consists of three letter (codon) is not only a code for one specific proteins, but maybe it’s also a code for two, three, four, and xx number of proteins.
Ball argues that biologists cannot make a claim that they know about how life works because at the molecular level, everything is so messy and there are infinite number of factors affecting life features. He opened up a book with stories of a weak 80-years-old woman and 50 years old healthy man. Both contracted COVID-19, but the latter did not survived. Why are individuals reacting differently to the same diseases? Is it gene, is it food, lifestyle, environment, socio-economic status? Although scientists could do correlation studies on each of these variables, they cannot know the causality of life.
Genes do not determine our life. We are not the machines of selfish genes as Dawkins proposed. There are inherently super complicated process happening within our cells and that involves both the cell’s inner resources and outer resources coming in from the outside. This super complicated system is happening within us in every second and we have no power or authority at all to direct their works.
At last, writing this as a religious person, I would say something Super Power is determining our life in both cellular and personal level. And for sure, it’s not genes.
Photo by Sangharsh Lokahare in Unsplash.