To what extent has biotechnology affected the foundations of classical Biology?

Nowadays we eat food elaborated from plants whose resistance and strength have been increased by transgenic methods. Our children can be conceived in vitro, outside our bodies. We respond with every weapon of our natural immune system to the artificial and fictitious threat of a recombinant vaccine. Can we still define Biology as the science studying the natural characteristics and physiological functions of living beings? Considering our present lives, most of us would answer "not at all".
Many common technological strategies use natural processes and tools to create functions or artificial characters in plants, in animals and until in bacteria. Today, the procedure of gene cloning in plasmids employing restriction enzymes became a traditional method. Both tools occur naturally. Plasmids are natural structures present in some microorganisms and restriction enzymes are natural bacterial endonucleases designed to destroy any foreign nucleic acid. Thanks of this kind of techniques we have at our disposal yeast or animal cultured cells producing proteins of great medicinal importance, like somatotrophin and insulin. Biotechnological development will allow us to rise cattle able to secrete human proteins in its milk.
Those strange technological manipulations seem very artificial at first sight. Nevertheless, they fulfil conditions and they take routes that never turn off from the basic physiological principles
characteristic of any alive organism processes. Of course, a human gene carries information of a human protein. However, if a human gene must be expressed by a bacterium (that is, if that gene must to produce its corresponding protein in a foreign host cell), it will need to fulfil the essential conditions required by bacteria to recognize a DNA sequence like a functional gene. That is to say, the gene must not have any message interruption and it should be flanked by bacterial -not human- regulation regions. As much as "recombinant" could be a vaccine (even if it only keeps one protein from the bacterium to which it must emulate), it will have to follow every step any foreign microorganism do to be recognized as a strange element by our immunological cells once vaccine is inoculated. In addition, our defensive answer will be the same as if the whole bacterium had come into our body. Of course, provided such bacterium is absent, the human being will easily win the "battle".
If we let ourselves be haunted by this second, fascinating -although controversial - point of view, we will recognize that we can also answer "yes" to the initial question. We can still define Biology as the science studying the natural characteristics and physiological functions of living beings. That way, we are accepting that the scope of Biology, with its own classical rules and principles, has undergone an enormous expansion during the last decades, even taking possession of some technological, pharmacological and medical areas.
Copyright Mirta Elena Grimaldi. All rights reserved.

What is success for Richard Dawkins?

The idea of selfish genes, capable of using the living organisms as molecular machines to achieve its own replication, was the most important XX century contribution to get Darwinism back to life. This theory appeared just at the same time Gould began to discuss some aspects of Darwinism in his Punctuated Equilibrium Theory.
Although the idea is not Dawkins’s, it is worth to him turning it one of the biggest materialistic claims nowadays. When you read Dawkins´ books you're prompted to think about Mettrie's man-machine, the best-known invention of the materialist writer of the Century of Lights. You're also likely to associate Dawkin´s ideas with Descartes’ man conception. Descartes thought animals were machines. They might (or not) be created in a particular God's creation act in the beginning of geological times. He never solved that point. There is a sort of immaterial little man inside human being, who drives the human machine at his will.
Dawkins´ DNA is also like a little man, but a molecular one. That molecular little man sets machines up to protect him against damage, so as he could persist in the being and make copies of himself. Dawkins´ idea is plenty of controvertible points, but I'm just interested in meditating on one of them. That is Dawkins´ concept of "success", usually accepted with no complaints even by his strongest critics. How does a gene turn out successful for Dawkins? Making so many exact copies of itself as possible. Let us imagine a gene codifying a red eye colour. This selfish gene would be successful if all the molecular machine descendants -machine made by the selfish gene for replicating itself- have got the red eye gene, even though the eye colour of the machine (more specifically, the eye colour of the animal who carry the machine) was green. I mean, the selfish gene only minds to persist in the being, although that persistence implied not being expressed by generations. Let us take this idea farther on. Let us imagine the gene goes on copying itself having been never expressed. In fact, this is the cheapest way to persist in the being. This is the cheapest way excepting the stones way, not even compelled to replicate. If the gene were never been expressed it would no longer be a gene, it would turn into trash DNA.
Provided Dawkins is right, the core of life would then be within genes. Greatest success of genes would be to persist. The gene just stays doing nothing. Genes would achieve that in a twisted way, assembling a body, replicating themselves. If they did not, natural selection would soon eliminate them. However, a trash DNA fragment is more successful than genes that keep as genes. A stone is even more successful, because it persist just being quiet.
Dawkins is not the only one who measures the success in conservative terms, but he is the only one who reduces it to the conservation of the individual gene. Somebody else think that the best way to avoid species extinction is to conserve its genetic identity in a gene bank. Perhaps the genes have created men so that men conserve genes in gene banks. Later, gene banks would become independent of men, and men would add their own genes to gene banks. Isn't this way to understand what success for living beings is weird? Is not rather success associated to the molecular machines made up by the genes for its own persistence and propagation? Those molecular machines change, evolve and sometimes think too. They transform the environment and make of Earth an almost living organization.
I refuse to find the core of life in DNA, because DNA seems to be the less changing, the less "alive" part of that dynamic process so-called life.

Copyright Daniel Omar Stchigel. All rights reserved.

Why do evolutionistic biologists like to participate in creationistic debates?

If you look at the Web pages devoted to the polemic of Darwinism versus Creationism and Intelligent Design, you'll notice the great amount of biologists taking part in them. Many of the participant biologists back an undefined evolutionism, only partially Darwinist, sometimes incorporating punctuationistic or symbiogenetic elements. The way they participate is very interesting. In many cases, they begin with a friendly and pedagogical attitude, speaking of facts, of classic tests, also of the sense in which Darwinism and Creationism are or are not scientific theories. In time, their attitude usually becomes rather rougher, until they adopt a unionist way of speaking; despising anyone who "talks with no enough knowledge". They finally use expressions such as "obscurantism", "dogmatism", "pseudoscience", and any other qualification whose objective seems to be giving a sudden end to the debate, just to aboard "more interesting subjects". Nevertheless, they go on participating, and they attack again against all odds. Sometimes they write just a sardonic sentence and they stay at margin, but we still feel their presence.
Why does it happen? I can imagine a very simple reason: boredom. At least the more popular version of evolutionism -the 50’s Great Synthesis, that joined Darwinism with Population Genetics- has become boring. That is not for lacking of interesting elements. We'll not object neither its verisimilitude, nor its macro evolutionary achievements. That is not the problem. The problem is that Synthesis is able to explain everything about life almost successfully. That is horrible. Nothing is more horrible than to manage to reach the XVIII century Enlightenment goal: abolishing obscurantism, abolishing all shadow and all mystery.
What does a biologist who dedicates to count genes, to compare and to process arduous phyllogenetic trees in his free time? He looks for enemies. His task is a tough one. He will get to know in detail every living being branch sprout from the common ancestor's tree, he will manage to imagine how the first colony of bacteria appeared in the primitive soup, and later it will arrive to a Great Emptiness. Just when Evolutionism did that, it will quench itself in a fate of glory and forgetfulness. As the evolutionary biologist senses this is what is going to happen, he watches around and looks for enemies. He knows animals need someone to fight with. Since he has sublimated too much, along so much time, biologist come in the virtual space and shows his claws and his teeth thirsty of blood. He wishes to face a difficult struggle and looks for getting hurt, just linguistically hurt.
Perhaps, in the middle of the fight, something the enemy could say would surprise him, something that would save him from the torture of knowing everything about his speciality. Perhaps, he would do the same as those viruses, which carry along with them a part of the genome of the cell they have destructed. If that happens, the discussion has not been in vain.
Copyright Daniel Omar Stchigel. All rights reserved .

A necessary conservatism

Biology seems to be the only science that conserves, in an extended version, a more than one hundred years old Research program: Darwinism. Although it is not just the Darwinism of Darwin - who knew nothing about DNA, RNA or proteins- the persistence of this explanation about the origin of species is weird. It keeps on conserving a rigid nucleus that has survived an important crisis that took place at the beginning of XX century. The Neo-Darwinism of the Fifties has surpassed this crisis.
Recently, abolition of teaching of the Darwinism (or teaching it along with alternative evolutionary models) in Natural Sciences lessons of certain American schools has been attempted. From then, the idea of a beginning of fracture in a structure considered so impregnable has become popular. In the discussion were involved those whom, as Behe, were for the idea of an Intelligent Design. Popular disagreement has increased still more by taking knowledge of alternative models, such as Kauffman’s Complex Systems Theory, or as Margulis’s Symbiogenesis. That happened after years learning at school -in a clearly vulgarized and wrong way - that "Men descend from monkeys".
In consequence, certain Spanish Universities accepted to give conferences about Intelligent Design in its cloisters. Many scientists, who returned to Darwinian project, objected this.
Darwinism does not die by a generalized indifference due to this controversy.
This discussion has also stimulated the resurgence of alternative ideas proposing modifications in physic rules statements. These ideas invoke an astral plane of cosmic forces, named “counter-space", capable of creating atoms "from nothing". They also invoke the capacity of mitochondrion to operate like particle accelerators, capable to transmute pure chemical elements into others by means of a cold fusion process.
I’ m specifically thinking about an spanish engineer trained in the school of Rudolf Steiner called Francesc Fígols. This author develops a sort of wonderful coherent dream in which he joins all the commonly named pseudo sciences, like homeopathy, with other disciplines seated just in the periphery of science, like Gaia Theory. He claims that life had not an origin in Earth, because Earth was always alive. Mountains formerly had properties of fluidity and locomotion, as well as Earth has emerged from Sun, like a sort of developing embryo. Earth has sheltered embryonic living forms that ramified into "crystallized species ". For a while, a central human core waited for the proper conditions to lose its cartilaginous character in order to acquire a solid and perfect skeleton, with a maximum capacity brain, doing better than other hominids. This hominids were not more than degenerated forms of what was going to come. There has never been one more opposite position to Darwin’s, although it’s based on nearly the same evidence.
It is not too strange that a dream like this had appeared at a time of paradigm crysis like which Biology suffers nowadays. I say “dream” to oppose it to official science, understood like “vigil”.
It is not an original idea. Plato spoke of an involution of the species, and even then he sets humanity at the top of the living hierarchy. I only want to discuss two of the Fígol’s ideas, summarized from the reading of the book Cosmos and Gea.
In first place, his theory requires too many changes in other scientific disciplines to be accepted as an alternative project of investigation respect of Darwinism. For instance, he assumes the existence of forces coming from the totality of Cosmos towards the living beings. These forces would give them form in an astrological way. In addition, he accepts cold fusion and creation of stuff "from nothing". All this turns to be unacceptable due to which I would name a "necessary conservatism".
It’s a simple thing: if everything is allowed, nothing can be explained. The creation and the transmutation of stuff put ourselves one step behind which the own Darwinism would dare to accept in matter of hazard. Movement of life could even transcend the physical and chemical restrictions. There is no science without rules, nor rules without restrictions and principles of conservation. In a universe where a fact cannot be repeated (not even approximately), nothing is a fact.
Secondly, it is interesting that Fígol’s theory draw on to the same Darwin’s argument for the non-existence of a complex fauna in the Pre-Cambrian era: the soft bodies do not leave fossil traces. This is why men in cartilaginous or embryonic state have not been discovered. The common trunk from which has sprout the mineralized branches was constituted -according to Fígols- by that embryonic men.
All this does not mean that this charming work, mixture of science, magic and science fiction, lacks of some sparkles of ideas, sparkles of possible future scientific development. I would compare this Fígol’s work with Olaf Stapledon’s "Star Maker" (a novel containing an interesting anticipation of Symbiogenesis Theory).
Copyright Daniel Omar Stchigel. All rights reserved.

Genes and epigenesis

The sense of life has been searched in the genes. It is supposed that, if atom Kingdom could be reached, the point where the not-life transforms itself into life could be found too looking through a microscope. That is not the truth. Just stuff in movement could be seen in the phenomena of life, or even life could be found there where physics only sees stuff in movement. Really, life is not just a matter of stuff. The way to find life is not dissecting a cell. That is a conception of a badly raised analysis, that what Whitehead called "badly raised concretization". Life is not a mere thing, life is a movement, a way to be, is election. Life is something characteristic, like the genius. We are looking for in the stuff something that is not inside it, but outside it, in another dimension, a design, an assembly of formative forces that use the physic-chemical dominion as a substrate for their original unfolding. Let us take only two examples.
First, let us consider the formation of the hand in the process of embryonic development. A small fin, a fragile fin forms itself in the beginning, with a fine skin that lets see us blood vessels. This fin made the biologists think that the development process reproduces the stages of the evolution of the species. However, what happens later with the fin? Does it develop fingers? No, the bones of the fingers are already in formation, under that skin, under that fragile meat. How fingers do form themselves, then? The cells of the fin, suddenly, start to destruct itself. The name of that self-destruction is "apoptosis". It seems that the fragile fin is going to disappear completely. How that compulsive death process could be stopped? It seems impossible. However, the process stops just when the form of the hand has been reached. How we explained this without thinking about an epigenetic training force that uses cells as its construction stuff?
Another example is the failure of the Human Genome Project. If we want to find in the genes the totality of information necessary to make a complete human organism, we must have about one hundred thousand genes. There are only thirty thousand genes. What happened with the rest of the information? Where are the other seventy thousand genes?
Now we know that, when DNA transcribed itself into ARN, the process does not finish. Specific enzymes cut the transcripted ARN in pieces and rejoin some of them. The final product is what the cell translates later into the language of proteins. Therefore, on the one hand, there is lacking information. On the other hand, a great part of the DNA does not contain information at all.
DNA no longer contains the secret wisdom to construct a living organism. DNA is just construction stuff, no more. Then, who is DNA maker?
The study of the human genome yielded another result, an unexpected, amazing result. If Theory of Evolution is correct, complex things would arise from simple ones. If this is true, we must be the strange result of the symbiosis of many viruses with bacteria. However, neither viruses nor bacteria have embryological development. In addition, origin of viruses already stands as an enigma for us. Viruses can only live inside complex living organisms, not in a free form in the outside. Once again we face the old and never solved paradox, that of the egg and the hen.
Copyright Daniel Omar Stchigel. All rights reserved.

Biology in the context of Science

We feel that there is a struggle between two roles of Science: its traditional investigative role searching for truth and the main sense of things, and its actual function as a technological raw material, that´ s to say, a simple tool for increasing capital gain in the productive chain.
When Galileo inaugurated Science, he wished to ”read” the world as it were a book written in mathematical characters. He didn’t intend -as the Positivism did-, to calculate for predicting nor to predict for dominating. He was propelled by astonishment. But astonishment has been lost behind the wish of domination, with no more aims than those put forth by its will to power.
Heidegger said: the Being shows itself in the entity and it´s hidden behind the entity. The truth of the entity is not the truth of the Being. Does it mean that we must go through the entity if we want to reach out to the Being? Which is the truth of the Being for Science? Is the Being the Phenomenon for Science, or the Being transcends the Phenomenon? Provided the Being transcends the Phenomenon, what Science tells us about the Being? What aspects of the Being are revealed to us through the Phenomenon?
When we talk about the Phenomenon, we talk about the Appearance, we speak of the faying surface between the world and our subjectivity. Ultimately, we want to come to a truth as a revelation of the deepest essence, a revelation of what it is, not of what it seems to be.
Psychology, for instance, began like a science of the soul. Now it is defined as a science of the behaviour. The difference consists in that behaviour is visible but soul is not. Nevertheless, when we love somebody, we want to know its soul, its more intimate thoughts.
Kant taught to us that the Understanding -the instrument of Science- can just give order to the Phenomenon, it can make a sense out of it from the questions that we make about it. If we want to go to the things themselves, we are forced to escape from the scope of the Understanding. When doing it, we are outside the scope of Science. After Kant era, Philosophy has pursued on its looking for the Being outside the purview of the Understanding.
Kierkegaard said that the Understanding is unable to comprehend the infinite. Hegel looked for a Dialectic Reason including and surpassing the Understanding. Jacobi relied on faith. Schopenhauer looked for an answer in the Hinduism. Nietzsche spoke to us of the Will to Power as a motor of life whose sense is revealed in art.
There was an important exception to this romantic post-Kantian process: Goethe. Goethe tried to construct a science of life that allowed him to find the Idea manifested by the Phenomenon.
He caught sight of the Idea in the Phenomenon, in an amalgam of Sensitivity and Understanding. Under his aesthetic glance, he reunited the scopes of the knowledge that Kant had separated.
Let us suppose -he seemed to consider- that the Being shows itself in the Creation as much as it doesn’t appear in men’s mind. So what Nature would be tell us about the Being?
That way, he took up again a line inaugurated by Kepler, who wished to read God’s Mind in the planets movement rules. Goethe mean the hope of the germane idealists, he was the last thinker who was compelled to avoid the fact that the paradigm of the mechanical explanations succeeded in science. Really, the mechanical paradigm didn’t deny God existance. Rather, it imagined God as a skilful watchmaker who had set up the big planetary clock and had leave it to develop on its own, according to rigid and universal rules.
It made no sense -for this Cartesian point of view- to adore a nature that we, as men, could have just created if we were Gods; a nature that, at least, we could get to understand and to modify to our advantage.
For Goethe, as for Thales, the world was full of Gods; those Gods were called "original plant", "original animal". Nevertheless, Goethe wanted to challenge the theory of Newton about the colours, and that attitude assigned him an image of dilettante that would ruin him within the still incipient scientific community, in which it was being still discussed if - as Newton said- space and time were the sensorial devices of God.
Today, more than ever, the purpose of physics is to read God’s Mind. Einstein said "God does not play dices". Hawking, paralyzed, seated in a wheelchair, declare that the sense of his life is to reveal the thought of God through the knowledge of his work. Nevertheless, Cosmology has become a sort of science fiction, and when common people ask themselves for the contributions of the scientific development, they think about Medicine and Biology. While the cosmologists ask themselves for the origin of Universe, Biology changes our universe keeping cloned organisms and transgenic food within our reach.
Biology finds the Being in the entity? Heidegger would say that this question is no longer a problem for Biology. Biology lives in the dominion of the entity, it forgot the Being, and it even forgot that it´s possible to ask this kind of questions. However, what would happen if -following Goethe- we wondered what has been revealed to Biology through all its recent discoveries? Is there only one paradigm in Biology? Would not be a misleading image of unit the one the contemporary biologists show to us when they hide themselves behind the figure of Darwin, provided he ejected definitively all spiritual worry from this scope of knowledge?
Copyright Daniel Omar Stchigel and Mirta E. Grimaldi. All rights reserved.

Our proposal

We try to explain the logic behind the complex molecular mechanisms, wich are the true architects in order to create living beings and regulate their functioning.
We approach different fields of Biology, including Physiology, Ecology, the Theory of the Evolution and the hypotheses about the Origin of Life, assuming the perspective of Molecular Biology, largely the more vertiginously developing biological discipline.
Far from assuming partisanships that would only contribute to increase the actual confussion between political, religious and philosophical issues, we draw away from all that, in order to focus in the paradigmatic aspects involved in actual discussions about Evolution, Intelligent Design and Free Order in Systems at the Edge of Chaos, discussions in which Gould, Kauffman, Goodwin, Margulis, Lovelock, Behe, and many others have participated.
We propose a non-reduccionist perspective considering the Complexity of Life, and avoiding to fall into the deceit of the "badly raised analysis". This deceit claims that to divide a system in its
components it is just like to arrive to its foundations and to go back in time towards the origins of the analyzed system.
We believe that Life is an event with a hidden being, and that Biology is the construction of an endless speech trying to catch that real being which cannot be turned into language.
We are looking for realizing the movement that is drawn between that removed being and the speech that intends to illuminate it.
Copyright Daniel Omar Stchigel and Mirta Elena Grimaldi. All rights reserved.