A new piece in Slate, Life Is Random: Biologists now realize that “nature vs. nurture” misses the importance of noise, makes a point which I’ve long been making: a lot of “environmental variation” is actually random, basically “noise”. I’d probably take issue with emphasis of the thesis, as I don’t quite think that the understanding of the role of noise in biology is quite so novel as the author makes it out to be. The headline does not help, though that probably can’t be attributed to the writer. Anyone who has worked in biology is well aware that many of the processes we attempt to understand are just really hard to tackle because of the overwhelming background noise against which we’re trying to pick up signal. Jim Manzi would term this “high causal density.” Social scientists have the same problem.
But it’s the last paragraph which really jumped out at me as notable:
Genetic determinism is the view that our genes make us who we are. Popular articles abound describing genes for daredevilishness, creativity, empathy, even being a Republican. Futurists and science-fiction authors predict that genetic engineering will someday allow designer children, built to order, with whatever smarts, looks, and personalities their parents prefer. But biology’s new recognition of the role of noise in development gives us one more reason to think that this simply isn’t going to happen. Gene mapping can’t tell you whether or not your kid will be a skydiver or a conservative, because gene expression is a far more complex phenomenon than biologists long imagined. Even if we can get the genes right, and somehow completely control environments, there will always be noise to make life richly unpredictable.
As I said above I’d take issue with the style of the exposition, as it makes the discovery of noise far more sensational and amazing to contemporary biologists than it is. But much of the substance, down to the illustration of randomness via elegans, I’m wholly on board with. But the author of the Slate piece leaves us with a very different moral than I usually do. She seems positively desirous of the rich creativity energy which noise injects into the developmental process. For me, on the contrary, the power of noise to mess with our expectations means that you have to emphasize even more those variables which have some understanding of. Genes.
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