Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44.3 (2001) 464-469

Book Review

The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution. 2d. ed

Susan Oyama's book thoroughly deserved reprinting. This is an exciting and engaging work that is still timely 15 years after its initial publication. Some of the text of the new edition is revised, and Oyama has added a new Preface and an Afterword. The new Foreword by Richard Lewontin provides a succinct [End Page 464] and sympathetic overview of the book and constitutes a rousing endorsement for the contemporary relevance of Oyama's work to biology.

Oyama presents a very direct and extremely radical critique of explanatory practice in biology and psychology (her original target): stop attributing so much causal power to the information gene. Understanding her criticism does not necessarily make matters easier for practicing biologists. Her basic idea follows from this claim: "The genome as constituting rules, instructions, or a program, either in the sense of a plan or in the sense of a computer program, is so common a notion as not to seem metaphoric at all" (p. 59). Her point is that, despite this state of affairs, the information gene concept is a metaphor that has seriously misled us. So, if we import this concept from molecular and evolutionary biology into developmental biology and psychology, our explanatory practice will founder. If we acknowledge and agree with this powerful point, defended at great length throughout the book, we can still ask "What is next?" or "How should we go about our explanatory practice in biology?"The answer that Oyama and "developmental systems theorists" propose is that what is next are new kinds of biological explanation and that our practice will become much more difficult.

As Lewontin rightly points out, Oyama has at least two main critical foci. The first is the concept of the information gene, which she argues derived from a cluster of pervasive metaphors rather than being a legitimate component of an explanatory theory. The second is the set of concepts of causation invoked in biology and psychology. She proposes an alternative understanding of causation that fits with the explanatory practice that will result from abandoning the information gene concept. Her overall project is to unite developmental and evolutionary explanations into a coherent understanding of the origin of organismal traits. These traits include the morphological traits of all organisms and psychological traits of humans. Oyama's theoretical perspective is "constructivist interactionism" (she substitutes this term for all appearances of "interactionism" in her first edition). She argues that we can only fully understand "developmental systems" from this perspective. Constructivist interactionism is the way she proposes that we understand an organism's response to genes and its environment. Each organism is part of a developmental system whose constellation of traits, at any one stage in the organism's life, can only be accounted for in terms of the interaction between many causal antecedents. Among these are the organism's genetic make-up, contingencies in its current environment, features of its environment reliably shared by conspecifics across generations, and so on. Oyama rejects any explanation that accords causal primacy to one or other of the causal antecedents of the organism's traits. She rejects locutions such as the "gene for" a trait and "environmentally determined," arguing that they are equally suspect: "Since the genome represents only a part of the entire developmental ensemble, it cannot by itself contain or cause the form that results. But then neither can its surroundings" (p. 23). [End Page 465]

Oyama presents a convincing case that the information gene concept deployed in evolutionary and molecular biology contains vestiges of preformationism and Aristotelian notions of causation.These two points are connected. Her charge is that the idea of information as a program or set of instructions contained in the gene takes the place of the miniature complete organism in the preformationists' view.What is crucial...