{"id":73995,"date":"2012-09-16T19:26:40","date_gmt":"2012-09-17T03:26:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=18358"},"modified":"2012-09-16T19:26:40","modified_gmt":"2012-09-17T03:26:40","slug":"what-the-substrate-tells","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/09\/16\/what-the-substrate-tells\/","title":{"rendered":"What the substrate tells"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the weird things about genetics is that it encompasses both the abstract and the concrete. The formal and physical. You can talk to a geneticist who is mostly interested in details of molecular mechanisms, and is steeped in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Structural_biology\">structural biology<\/a>. For these people genes are specific and material <em>things<\/em>. In contrast there are other geneticists who focus more on genes as units of <em>analysis<\/em>. In this case genes are semantic labels for the mediators within an intersection of phenomena. Recall <strong>that genetics predates the knowledge of its concrete substrate by 50 years!<\/strong> By the 1920s Mendelian genetics had been fused with evolutionary biology to create a systematic framework in which we could understand the patterns of inheritance across the generations. In the 1950s the DNA revolution was upon us, but as <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/W._D._Hamilton\">W. D. Hamilton<\/a> recalls this had only a minimal impact on the evolutionary genetic thinkers of the era. With the <a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=ng85sd1UR7EC&amp;lpg=PT337&amp;ots=pqN93e_8kK&amp;dq=lewontin%20hubby%20allozyme%20paper&amp;pg=PT337#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\">Lewontin and Hubby allozyme paper<\/a> in the mid-1960s this sort of benign disciplinary evasion was no longer possible; the field of molecular evolution came into its own.*<\/p>\n<p>Today with genomics these human-imposed artificialities are fading away. Consider the concept of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Genetic_recombination\">genetic recombination<\/a>. Originally an &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the weird things about genetics is that it encompasses both the abstract and the concrete. The formal and physical. You can talk to a geneticist who is mostly interested in details of molecular mechanisms, and is steeped in structural biology. F&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,204,4,82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-evolutionary-genetics","category-genetics","category-genomics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74060,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73995\/revisions\/74060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}