Making duchesses of draggle-tailed guttersnipes

A scientific wager to be adjudicated by the Royal Society? Oh, smashing good fun, chaps!

In short, "Prof Wolpert bets that the following will happen. Dr Sheldrake bets it will not: By May 1, 2029, given the genome of a fertilized egg of an animal or plant, we will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that develops from it, including any abnormalities." [Boing Boing, via Detritus].

I'm afraid the good Dr. Wolpert is doomed to lose. The whole scenario reminds me of an essay titled "An Earnest Proposal" by Lewis Thomas (in his collection Lives of a Cell), in which he proposes that, tied to the big red buttons of the world's thermonuclear arsenal, we have program that prevents their launch until we've entered every single detail of the structure of a single microorganism: Mixotricha paradoxa, an intestinal bacterium living inside the guts of Australian termites. This at first seems like a ludicrously minimal safeguard against nuclear holocaust, but the essay goes on to explain that M. paradoxa is really rather more complicated than one might expect. Its flagella are fully-formed spirochetes themselves, its cytoplasmic organelles are bacteria with enzymes that break down cellulose, and its centrioles are yet a third kind of unique creatures. Thomas imagines that, at the end of a decade of superpowers racing to collect the required information and, presumably, angrily growling at each other all the while, some hapless government scientist will finally input everything they've learned, only to receive the message: "Request more data. How are spirochetes attached? Do not fire!"

It's a charming essay, featuring Thomas' typically brilliant prose, but why do I bring it up here? Only to say that life is infinitely more complex than we tend to realize. I imagine that when 2029 rolls around, and the fine port is aged to delicious perfection, Dr. Wolpert will triumphantly present his genomic databanks and his predictive algorithms based on amino acid sequences, and Dr. Sheldrake will only need to find a single aspect left unexplained to win the case of Quinto.

Now, I happen to agree with Sheldrake on principle, too. I think that an organism's genes are the central determinant of the majority of its features, but that there are too many environmental factors involved in growth and development to comfortably state that nucleic acids are the be all and the end all in determination. Granted, a simple enough organism bred under strict laboratory controls may fit Wolpert's criteria-- in which case, I hope he enjoys his rich beverage.

I worry, too, about the implications of developing a paradigm of genetic determinism, as biology guided by such principles has the potential to be misused in some spectacularly errant ways. Being able to "blame it on the genes" could be a rather dangerous proposition for human beings in particular, as would, I believe, any model that permits us to take less responsibility for our own condition and actions. Not to say that we should shy away from the answers to these questions, any more than we should be blaming Darwin for Social Darwinism (or Nazism, as some wingnuts take great delight in doing). But we must, as ever, proceed with prudent acknowledgment of the possible repercussions of scientific research.