I will praise Thee;
for I am fearfully and wonderfully made...
Psalm 139:14
"Geneticist Richard C. Lewontin’s famous 1997 essay in the New
Does that level of dogmatic certainty produce a reliably clear picture of nature? In the NYRB essay, Lewontin mentions a controversy in evolution:
Q: Can life forms acquire characteristics during their lifespan that they pass on to their offspring?
A: He was quite certain that the answer is no:
It seems that materialism, at least in Lewontin’s day, could simply
decommission a whole set of observations that did not accord with the hardening dogma of a science, in this case, genetics.
Now, scientists are exploring how organisms can pass on epigenetic traits, which are features that contribute to an individual’s phenotype without altering the underlying gene sequence. Epigenetic changes include methyl groups tagged onto DNA, modifications to the histones that wrap DNA, and the breakdown of mRNA transcripts to silence genes. Though scientists have yet to unravel the precise mechanisms behind epigenetic inheritance, recent evidence reveals noncoding RNA could be pivotal to passing on acquired traits.
In short, Lewontin’s dogmatic commitment to materialism seems to have functioned as a reinforcer of dogmatism in general. Epigenetics is probably not immaterial, of course; it is a natural process like many others. But somehow, when dogmatism seemed to be a virtue, the very idea of its existence got in the way of the “definitive
rejection of any possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics” — and the rest is history. Not an inspiring history. Rather, one that should serve as a warning.
In writing that science’s materialism is absolute, Richard Lewontin wrote as one who did not grasp the fatal flaw in his absolutism.
"But no serious student of epistemology any longer takes the naive view of science as a process of Baconian induction from theoretically unorganized observations. There can be no observations without an immense apparatus of preexisting theory. Before sense experiences
become “observations” we need a theoretical question, and what counts as a relevant observation depends upon a theoretical frame into which it is to be placed. Repeatable observations that do not fit into an existing frame have a way of disappearing from view, and the experiments that produced them are not revisited. In the 1930s well-established and respectable geneticists described “dauer-modifications,” environmentally induced changes in organisms that were passed on to offspring and only slowly disappeared in succeeding generations. As the science of genetics hardened, with its definitive rejection of any possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, observations of dauer-modifications were sent to the scrapheap where they still lie, jumbled together with other decomNow, the prose is a bit dense, but by “dauer-modifications,”
Lewontin is referring to “an acquired character transmitted through the cytoplasm to several succeeding generations but not incorporated into the permanent heredity of the strain” (Merriam–Webster). Today, that’s generally called epigenetic change.
Notice how Lewontin — guardian of science as interpreted through materialism — handled the question: “As the science of genetics hardened, with its definitive rejection of any possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, observations of dauer-modifications were sent to the scrapheap where they still lie, jumbled together with other decommissioned facts.”It seems that materialism, at least in Lewontin’s day, could simply
Now, scientists are exploring how organisms can pass on epigenetic traits, which are features that contribute to an individual’s phenotype without altering the underlying gene sequence. Epigenetic changes include methyl groups tagged onto DNA, modifications to the histones that wrap DNA, and the breakdown of mRNA transcripts to silence genes. Though scientists have yet to unravel the precise mechanisms behind epigenetic inheritance, recent evidence reveals noncoding RNA could be pivotal to passing on acquired traits.
In short, Lewontin’s dogmatic commitment to materialism seems to have functioned as a reinforcer of dogmatism in general. Epigenetics is probably not immaterial, of course; it is a natural process like many others. But somehow, when dogmatism seemed to be a virtue, the very idea of its existence got in the way of the “definitive
rejection of any possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics” — and the rest is history. Not an inspiring history. Rather, one that should serve as a warning.
In writing that science’s materialism is absolute, Richard Lewontin wrote as one who did not grasp the fatal flaw in his absolutism.
If the mind is an illusion of the brain, the pursuit of science is illusory too. If the mind is real but immaterial, science is saved — but materialism is dead."
MindMatters
