One of the deepest problems in biology is to explain development, the process by which organisms reliably grow into organisms of the right kind. Dogs give birth to puppies not snakes or cabbages. Preformationism, a solution to this problem often illustrated by quaint seventeenth century pictures of tiny babies squatting in the head of a sperm is an attractive solution to this problem: the structure of the adult is there from the beginning. Not long ago genomes were widely seen as offering a sophisticated version of such a solution. The actual structure of the adult was not there from the start, to be sure, but in the genome we could find a programme or a blueprint from which the organism could be constructed.

This interpretation of the genome sees the genome as a stable thing with remarkable properties that somehow encode or represent the future organism. But it is now clear that the genome is, on the contrary, an entity in constant flux, a process, I would say, rather than a thing. Although nucleotide sequence is a highly stable feature of genomes, even this is maintained as such by a range of editing and repair processes. Moreover, the function of the genome is constantly sensitive to interactions with a variety of molecules in the cell which, in turn, change the physical structure of the system in ways that determine what genes are expressed. The genome, in short, is a fully interactive participant in cellular processes. I said this was increasingly an historical issue, as the failure of the idea of genome as blueprint is no longer very controversial among well-informed scientists. The interpretation of this change in terms of process ontology is, no doubt, less widely agreed.

The above passages come from an essay by John Dupré titled “A Process Ontology for Biology.” Yeah, it does take a bit of a twist of the mind to think about reality as process–as opposed to objects–but I’ve found process thought to be really not as counter intuitive as some may want to argue, in fact quite the opposite.

Tags:biologyJohn Dupremetaphysicsontologyphilosophyprocess philosophyscience