Saturday, May 7, 2011

Context

I am obsessed with the idea of CONTEXT - how we cannot understand anything unless we also look at the context in whicch this happens. In biology, the importance of context is obvious. How a cell or an individual responds to a stimulus is entirely dependent on its context - what state it is in when the signal is recieved, what has happened to it in the past and what else is occuring at the same time. This spans behaviour, learning, cell biology, development, evolution, ecology etc.

This has an impact on my assessment of the (spurious) 'nature vs. nurture' debate. The 'nature' part (the genome) has zero adaptive value in its own right and it is only when it is expressed (which depends entirely on induction from external cues, be they truly environmental or from within the organism) that genetics can have any effect. Context (the entire extra-genomic part of an organism - all parts of the internal and external environment) is critical. Of course, genetic differences can alter the responses to cues and are the mechanism of transgenerational inheritance, but I think one needs to be very careful to avoid thinking in an overly deterministic way about biology.

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