The Gene Is Dead — Long Live the Gene! Conceptualizing Genes the Constructionist Way

Abstract

Mae-Wan Ho (1988) pointed out that it is a particular problem of contemporary biology that it destroys the “Unity of Nature” by looking through the “Neo-Darwinian looking glass”. The “Unity of Nature” was, and is, a fact of immediate experience for many civilizations past and present. The history of science indicates, however, that science “is concerned with separating and reducing this unity into ever smaller and smaller fragments of which nature somehow must be glued together.” Ho continues: It is a history, not only of fragmentation, but of our own alienation from nature.“ Not only the inorganic world has become reduced to mechanisms and atoms, but the organic world as well. In this process it is “Neo-Darwinism which dealt the final blow in disintegrating the organism to a mere collection of particles (genes) shuffled by blind selective ‘forces’.” The result is that “....humanity [is left] to the dilemma of a disembodied and hence impotent mind pitched against the mindless automation of a body controlled by genes whose sole imperative is to replicate.” In opposition to this approach, Ho demands that we return to a rival tradition “that resolutely resists fragmentation in favour of integration and process.” Because: “once we begin to see biology again in the light of nature’s unity, mind and body will become reunited through processes embracing every level from the sociocultural to the molecular. The organism itself — its functions, volitions and actions — will then be rightly perceived, not as the sole consequence of natural selection, but as a focus of being immanent to process and emerging simultaneously with it.” (Ho 1988, p. 117f.). The organism becomes relocated within nature.

For numerous discussions and support I want to thank Prof. Dr. Michael Drieschner, Norbert Held and Romy Tajon. In addition, I am very obliged to Dr. Barbara Alexius for her help in proof-reading the English version of my manuscript.