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Lecture one, Descriptive
versus Mechanistic Biology.
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Contemporary Biology is on par
with Alchemy and Astrology
in that it is descriptive
and non-predictive.
The Evolutionary Physiology
course is structured
to provide a mechanistic,
predictive way of
thinking about biology.
0:19
Up until the publication
of the Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin in 1859,
man was thought to
have descended from God,
angels and demons,
by the great chain of being.
Darwin offered
a different form of descent
from animal ancestors,
which was a radical departure.
0:35
Despite our enlightened
understanding
of our evolutionary origins, we
continue to think of physiology
in the same way that
it has been thought of
the last 3,000 years.
As an assemblage
of Lego blocks formed
by the skeleton
and internal organs.
0:49
Down through history,
physiologists such as Galen,
Harvey, Claude Bernard,
Walter Cannon, Ewald Weibel,
and J.B. West, have honed
and refined that
descriptive relationship
culminating in systems biology,
which is a mathematical
expression
of the very same
descriptive view of physiology.
1:07
Systems biology reduces
the processes of physiology
to its functional elements,
DNA and phenotypes
into post-biological networks
that generate physiology
in adaptation
to the environment.
This perspective is predicated
on the current view of biology
as a progression from
DNA to RNA to protein.
Yet we know that you cannot
generate phenotype from DNA.
1:31
The great epigeneticist
Waddington attempted
to envision a more
holistic view of physiology
as landscapes supported
by genetic pathways
that underpin them,
but this was only a metaphor
without any fundamental
understanding
of the interrelationships
between genes
and phenotypes either.
