What is a Gene? From molecules to metaphysics

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 27 (6):471-497 (2006)
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Abstract

Mendelian genes have become molecular genes, with increasing puzzlement about locating them, due to increasing complexity in genomic webworks. Genome science finds modular and conserved units of inheritance, identified as homologous genes. Such genes are cybernetic, transmitting information over generations; this too requires multi-leveled analysis, from DNA transcription to development and reproduction of the whole organism. Genes are conserved; genes are also dynamic and creative in evolutionary speciation—most remarkably producing humans capable of wondering about what genes are.

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10.1007/s11017-006-9022-9

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References found in this work

Cybernetics.Norbert Wiener - 1948 - New York,: M.I.T. Press.
Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology.Kim Sterelny & Paul Edmund Griffiths - 1999 - Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Biology as ideology: the doctrine of DNA.Richard C. Lewontin - 1991 - New York, NY: HarperPerennial.
The Century of the Gene.Evelyn Fox Keller - 2001 - Journal of the History of Biology 34 (3):613-615.
The concept of information in biology.John Maynard Smith - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (2):177-194.

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