Darwin’s legacy II: why biology is not physics, or why it has taken a century to see the dependence of genes on the environment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Genes and environment make the organism. Darwin stood firm in his denial of any direct role of environment in the modification of heredity. His theory of evolution heralded two debates: one about the importance and adequacy of natural selection as the main mechanism of evolution, and the other about the role of genes versus environment in the modification of phenotype and evolution. Here, I provide an overview of the second debate and show that the reasons for the gene versus environment battle were twofold: first, there was confusion about the role of environment in modifying the inheritance of a trait versus the evolution of that trait, and second, there was misunderstanding about the meaning of environment and its interaction with genes in the production of phenotypes. It took nearly a century to see that environment does not directly affect the inheritance of a phenotype (i.e., its heredity), but it is nevertheless the primary mover of phenotypic evolution. Effects of genes and environment are not separate but interdependent. One cannot separate the effect of genes from that of environment, or nature from nurture. To answer the question posed in the title, it is partly because the 20th century has been a century of unending progress in genetics. But also because unlike physics, biology is not colorblind; progress in biology has often been delayed beyond the Kuhnian paradigm change due to built-in interest in negating the influence of environment. Those who are against evolution, of course, cannot be expected to understand the role of environment in evolution. Those for it, many biologists included, believing in the supremacy of genes empowers them by giving adaptation a solely gene-directed (self-driven) "teleological" interpretation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".