Has classical gene position been practically reduced?
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Has classical gene position been practically reduced? Oriol Vidal1,2 · David Teira2 Received: 19 February 2020 / Accepted: 8 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract One of the defining features of the classical gene was its position (a band in the chromosome). In molecular genetics, positions are defined instead as nucleotide numbers and there is no clear correspondence with its classical counterpart. However, the classical gene position did not simply disappear with the development of the molecular approach, but survived in the lab associated to different genetic practices. The survival of classical gene position would illustrate Waters’ view about the practical persistence of the genetic approach beyond reductionism and anti-reductionist claims. We show instead that at the level of laboratory practices there are also reductive processes, operating through the rise and fall of different techniques. Molecular markers made the concept of classical gene position practically dispensable, leading us to rethink whether it had any causal role or was just a mere heuristic. Keywords Gene position · Reductionism · Molecular markers · Genetic approach
Reductionism in the practice turn The practical turn in philosophy of science has led to a reconsideration of many classical concepts in the field. The debate on reduction during the last half of twentieth century hinged around theories, whether some of them could be somehow inferred from some other theories, in a way that captured the progress of science. Attractive as it was, there have been very few consensually successful reductions and this lack of results made anti-reductionist pluralism the mainstream view among philosophers of science. Ken Waters has recently restated in practice terms this debate between reductionists and anti-reductionists, drawing on an analysis of genetics throughout the twentieth century. * Oriol Vidal [email protected] David Teira [email protected] 1
Departament de Biologia, Universitat de Girona, Girona, Spain
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Dpto. de Lógica, Historia y Filosofía de la ciencia, UNED, Madrid, Spain
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O. Vidal, D. Teira
The reducibility of classical to molecular genetics has been a matter of controversy for decades in the philosophy of biology. The classical definition of gene has four principal elements (Weber 2004): position, mutation, recombination and function. In classical genetics, with the rise of cytogenetic techniques, genes became the unit for function, recombination and mutation while keeping a position on the chromosomes. Genes functioned as causes for the phenotype, and were assumed to be the target of mutations causing variations in those phenotypes.1 The development of molecular genetics presented genes as the class of DNA sequences that determine the linear sequences of amino acids in a protein (Weber 2004).2 This new gene concept was completely defined in molecular concepts yielding the description of the central dogma of molecular biology. Molecular genetics also led to a r
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