Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
information and the networks of molecular interactions which ensue
from it. This strategy corresponds to having a fixed view of the
living organism that ignores variability, and leads inexorably to the
contradiction in genetic determinism. We are drawing up maps.
After mapping the genome, we are now drawing up one for all the
genes transcribed in a cell (transcriptomes) and another for all the
proteins with their interactions (proteomes). It is hoped that from
this data, we will be able to explain, possibly with the help of a
computer program, how the cell functions. This is an error.
Accumulating these data is certainly not totally devoid of interest,
but the genes expressed and the interactions which are produced
between proteins in a cell are the result of the way it functions and
not the cause. The interactions have been selected by cellular
processes from among the huge number of combination possibilities
arising from molecular non-specificity, and it is precisely this selec-
tion process, which is the functioning process of the cell, that we
need to explain. We come back here to our metaphor of the man
lost in the Amazonian forest. The selection process is the Amazon.
We have to turn back to see it and analyse it instead of continuing
to accumulate contingent observations.
Inevitably, ontophylogenesis radically modifies the approach to
mapping the living organism which genetics induces, by giving vari-
ability its rightful place. Since it acknowledges the intrinsically
probabilistic character of biological phenomena, it equally acknowl-
edges the variability which arises from it and provides the substrate
for phenomena of cellular selection. For ontophylogenesis, variabil-
ity can no longer be reduced to a simple margin of fluctuation. On
the contrary, it attributes to it a primordial causal role. Studying it
must therefore be systematised and put back into probabilistic
explanatory schemes, and this should be done directly in regard to
experimental measures set up and not just at the level of theoreti-
cal interpretation. Indeed, if variability is a significant biological
parameter, it must vary quantitatively during physiological
processes, like any parameter, and this quantitative variation must
be correlated with other parameters of these processes in such a
way that this correlation helps to explain them. The research
