Abstract

Thomas Kuhn described the progress of science as comprising occasional paradigm shifts separated by interludes of ‘normal science’. The paradigm that has held sway since the inception of molecular biology is that genes (mainly) encode proteins. In parallel, theoreticians posited that mutation is random, inferred that most of the genome in complex organisms is non‐functional, and asserted that somatic information is not communicated to the germline. However, many anomalies appeared, particularly in plants and animals: the strange genetic phenomena of paramutation and transvection; introns; repetitive sequences; a complex epigenome; lack of scaling of (protein‐coding) genes and increase in ‘noncoding’ sequences with developmental complexity; genetic loci termed ‘enhancers’ that control spatiotemporal gene expression patterns during development; and a plethora of ‘intergenic’, overlapping, antisense and intronic transcripts. These observations suggest that the original conception of genetic information was deficient and that most genes in complex organisms specify regulatory RNAs, some of which convey intergenerational information. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/qxeGwahBANw.