Quite the graphic way of saying it. I might have to steal that.

T he way I like to look at it is that transposons are just another mutational mechanism. As far as the definition of gene, I think people (not just Carl) are understating the previous controversy and overstating the effect of the new information.

It is quite a big deal that epigenetic marks are more prevalent and influential than we thought, but that’s basically because the technology to investigate them at a large scale is only now being developed. Various forms of epigenetic mark have been known about for quite a long time. They weren’t really analyzed in a genome-wide way because before nobody had the money or the technology to do it.

I guess some people felt epigenetic regulation, post-transcriptional regulation, and splicing were unimportant because they couldn’t see them with their microarrays and RT-PCR, but as long as we’ve known about those things people have arguing that they were very important.

I think genome scientists often think they are the pioneers in every field because they’ve found something revolutionary they never heard before. When usually people in less well funded fields have been plugging away studying the same things for years and years. They may not have had the amount of data that genome scientists have, but most of the time they have
some idea of what’s going on.

Evolutionary biologists at least have been arguing about the definition of a gene almost as long as they’ve been arguing about the definition of a species. Our idea of exactly what genes are and how complex they are is definitely changing, but it’s a gradual evolution, rather than a saltational shift. I like Tom Gingeras’s quote “Its almost a recapture of what the term was originally meant to convey”. Exactly. It was never a hard and fast definition, except maybe to some high-school biology teachers (and apparently some genomicists).

I’m conflicted about the article. I enjoyed reading it, and Carl Zimmer definitely presented some of the complexity involved. The problem is it seemed to me to fall into the classic science writer (and scientist) trap of over-sensationalizing. To Carl’s credit it’s very hard to avoid that when you’re talking to genome scientists. I’m not sure if there’s a field of science with more successful sensationalizers than genome biology. (Maybe space science or something like that, NASA’s got to have some of the best PR in science).

As far as evolution goes I’m still not convinced that epigenetics is something so shocking. I view it as yet another layer of regulation. It is pretty nifty that epigenetic marks can persist across a generation, but I don’t think that many people are seriously arguing that it’s persistent enough to be the carrier of long term evolutionary information.