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Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2001 13:12:18 -0400
To: Tom Schneider <tdsSPAMBLOCK@post.xecu.net>
From: Phillip Johnson <philjohn@uclink4.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Re: TD Schneiders Unanswered Question to You
Cc: philjohn@uclink4.berkeley.edu
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I see you are a genetic reductionist, and a very aggressive one.  You act 
as if you were prosecuting a thought-crime, which probably is how you think 
of it. Playing that game doesn't interest me.

I suggest that you go after that notorious creationist, Richard Lewontin.

Phillip Johnson

http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?20010719036F#top
New York Review of Books
FEATURE
July 19, 2001
After the Genome, What Then?
RICHARD LEWONTIN

This article will appear as the second epilogue to the chapter "The Dream 
of the Human Genome" in the paperback edition of Richard Lewontin's It 
Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions, to 
be published in October by New York Review Books.
* * *

"The major irony of the sequencing of the human genome is that the result 
turns out not to provide the answer to the chief question that motivated 
the project. Now that we have the complete sequence of the human genome we 
do not, alas, know anything more than we did before about what it is to be 
human."
* * *

"If, as the eminent molecular biologist Walter Gilbert wrote, a knowledge 
of the human genome would cause "a change in our philosophical 
understanding of ourselves," that change has not been quite what was hoped 
for. It appears that we are not much different from vegetables, if we can 
judge from our genomes."
* * *

"The reaction to the discovery that human beings do not have much more 
genomic information than plants and worms has been to call for a new and 
even more grandiose project. It is now agreed among molecular biologists 
that the genome was not really the right target and that we now need to 
study the "proteome," the complete set of all the proteins manufactured by 
an organism. Surely the very complex human being must have many more 
different proteins than a small flowering plant. Although the devotees of 
the genome project kept assuring us that genes made proteins and therefore 
when we had all the genes we would know all the proteins, they now say 
that, of course, they knew all along that genes don't make proteins."