<一般論文> ゲノム情報とエピジェネティクス : 方法論的遺伝子中心主義の擁護

Abstract

For the last three decades, the gene-centrism have been criticized not only in philosophy of biology but also in some other scientific fields. Evolutionary developmental biology, ecological developmental biology, and medicine have emphasized "epigenetics" (i.e., researches on epigenetic interactions) to explain novelties or variations of traits, and some argue that epigenetic researches are a kind of "revolution" against the gene-centrism. A stronger criticism can be found in developmental systems theory: Some advocators argue that we cannot determine the specific causes of trait formation, and that the gene-centrism is cleary wrong. This article focuses on researches on genomic information especially in medicine and argues that we should distinguish between empirical and methodological gene-centrism, and the latter can be still defended. Actually there have been discovered many statistically relevant genes for some specific diseases especially in genome-wide association studies, and they promote further epigenetic or developmental studies, suggesting that methodological gene-centrism is useful in these cases.