ABSTRACT
The Human Genome Project (HGP) may be seen in terms of five distinct but overlapping phases of it’s evolution. These phases evolve through technological development within HGP and from discovery from independent researchers who have been following a more complex vision of life for many years. These phases are: (I) Monogenic and (II) Polygenic determinism, (III) Protein pheno-type as opposed to genotype analysis (Proteome), (IV) Model organism analysis (Transgenics) and (V) Complex adaptive systems analysis. One may detect in this series a strong movement away from strict genetic determinism where informational complexity in whole genomes is proving to be unmanageable. The transitions from stage I-V are driven by mis-assumptions and their resulting experimental anomalies discovered within each stage. As each stage develops it confronts increasing complexity and the need for some kind of complex systems analysis and non-linear theory capable of structuring the growing data bases and poviding for testable hypothesis of the system’s behavior. However, for a variety of reasons, ranging from scientific narrowness within the community of experimental biologists, to the socioeconomic needs of an ever increasing dominance of technology over fundamental science, non-linear systems approaches capable of recognizing simple rules for adaptive behavior have not been embraced until stage V. Instead, modem biology has repeatedly relapsed into what has been called “blind reductionism” and the search for specific genes or gene programs that are thought to “cause” or otherwise control complex organismal behavior. However, with stage V we see the reemergence of interest in systems approachs 54which complement the traditional and essential process of a reductionism whose proper role is the description of agents and their dynamics within levels of organization each level with its own rules and laws of behavior. This is contrasted with a vulgar reductionism which insists on reducing complex behaiors at higher leals exclusixely to the laws governing the lower levels; for our purposes in this paper, to the laws and rules governing genes and molecular agents. it is this “levels” problem that generates the confusion now characterizing so much of what is seen as a failure in biological reductionism. Stage V recognizes the illegitimate nature of extending linear genetic causality, gene programs, etc. to the levels of organization and behavior above the genome and locates “the program” in environmentally open networks of agents, including genes (as circuits) , whose total behavior is not reducible to the agents themselves. Post genomics will mostly be concerned with the rules gowming non-linear biological open systems: complex adaptive systems in which genes play a necessary but insufficient role in determining phenotype.
