Alex Rosenberg

No one has expressed the destructive power of Darwinian theory more effectively than Daniel Dennett. Others have recognized that the theory of evolution offers us a universal acid, but Dennett, bless his heart, coined the term. Many have appreciated that the mechanism of random variation and natural selection is a substrate-neutral algorithm that operates at every level of organization from the macromolecular to the mental, at every time scale from the geological epoch to the nanosecond. But it took Dennett to express the idea in a polysyllable or two. These two features of Darwinism undermine more wishful thinking about the way the world is than any other brace of notions since mechanism was vindicated in physics.

This paper argues that nothing that has been discovered in the increasingly complex delails of gene regulation has provided any grounds to retract or qualify Crick's version of the central dogma. In particular it defends the role of the genes as the sole bearers of information, and argues that the mechanism of epigenetic modification of the DNA is but another vindication of Crick's version of the central dogma. The paper shows that arguments of C.K. Waters for the distinctive causual role of the genes are equivalent in important respects to the present ones and concludes with a defense of the informational role of the genes against an argument from trans-actĭng genetic regulation due to Stotz