There is no denying the Central Dogma’s impact on the biological sciences. Since the Dogma’s formulation by Francis Crick in 1958, however, many have debated the Dogma’s empirical adequacy. My aim is to move beyond these discussions, and instead consider the Central Dogma’s significance to contemporary biological practice. To do this, I consider four distinct approaches for determining the non-descriptive methodological significance of a scientific principle. I argue that these approaches fail to vindicate the Central Dogma, and that, under many (...) of these approaches, the Dogma amounts to a triviality. (shrink)

On the basis of findings from developmental biology, some researchers have argued that evolutionary theory needs to be significantly updated. Advocates of such a “developmental update” have, among other things, suggested that we need to re-conceptualize units of selection, that we should expand our view of inheritance to include environmental as well as genetic and epigenetic factors, that we should think of organisms and their environment as involved in reciprocal causation, and that we should reevaluate the rates of evolutionary change. (...) However, many of these same conclusions could be reached on the basis of other evidence, namely from microbiology. In this paper, I ask why microbiological evidence has not had a similarly large influence on calls to update biological theory, and argue that there is no principled reason to focus on developmental as opposed to microbiological evidence in support of these revisions to evolutionary theory. I suggest that the focus on developmental biology is more likely attributable to historical accident. I will also discuss some possible room for overlap between developmental and microbiology, despite the historical separation of these two subdisciplines. (shrink)

The philosophy of biology literature offers several arguments aimed at showing that information theory is conceptually unsuited to capture the informational talk in molecular biology. Such arguments led to the consensus that, if the informational talk in biology can be defended and explained at all, we need a different strategy. The debate, in fact, developed mostly along this line. However, recent contributions seem to (and even claim to) challenge the consensus and thus to vindicate the role and relevance of information (...) theory to this particular debate. In this paper, I examine the main arguments leading to such a consensus and I analyze the extent to which those recent accounts actually succeed in vindicating the invocation of information theory. I argue that these attempts fail to vindicate the information-theoretic strategy and, therefore, the consensus remains unaffected by them. (shrink)