RNA and the Economist

The Economist claims that RNA will herald the breakthrough of the century of biology, just as the 20th century was the century of physics. They focus on the defeating of aging, climate change, and infectious disease, all of which will be directly affected by advances in biological science - for instance, cost-effective sustainable fuels will come from things we grow, not natural resources we mine or drill. They will also reduce carbon emissions. For aging, and the related advent of genetic medicine, knowing how cells form, divide, and do their jobs will allow us to copy and improve upon biological nanotechnology, and make available an unimaginable cornucopia of medicines and structural fixes for our ills. Of course, nanotech can also cause pandemic infection – re my Doomsday argument – but the vaccines and other defenses will themselves be variations of nanotech – we must simply hope the good guys stay ahead of the bad ones.

The Economist makes a more ambitious claim, one I find fascinating as a philosopher of science. The magazine asserts:

“Biology, though, does more than describe humanity's place in the universe. It describes humanity itself. And here, surprisingly, the rise of RNA may be an important part of that description. Ever since the human-genome project was completed, it has puzzled biologists that animals, be they worms, flies or people, all seem to have about the same number of genes for proteins—around 20,000. Yet flies are more complex than worms, and people are more complex than either. Traditional genes are thus not as important as proponents of human nature had suspected nor as proponents of nurture had feared. Instead, the solution to the puzzle seems to lie in the RNA operating system of the cells. This gets bigger with each advance in complexity. And it is noticeably different in a human from that in the brain of a chimpanzee.”
(http://economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9339752)

Whatever the value of the metaphor of body as hardware and mind as software, it is increasingly clear that simplistic reductionism of neuroprocessing to computer programming has failed. The reason may lie in the former fascination of genetics with DNA alone, and not even all of it – as the so-called ‘junk DNA’, long ignored by neuroscientists, is now known to have important functions. And this recent research raises an additional problem for practical Dennettian AI reductionism of (human) mind to machine - RNA may also be crucial for the “operating system” of each cell in the body. Could biology be on the verge of a ‘paradigm shift’ as significant as the twin movements from classical mechanics and Newtonian gravity to quantum mechanics and general relativity in the first 3 decades of the 20th century? Time will tell. If we have enough of it, before we do ourselves in, that is.