Are there any laws in biology?. Comment on 'How life changes itself: The read-write (RW) genome' by James Shapiro.

摘要

Being educated as a physicist, I find the most frustrating aspect of biology in the lack of universal laws. You can hardly make any definite statement in biology without invoking exceptions. It was pretty frustrating already, but now we learn from Shapiro’s very well documented account [1] that the sanctum sanctorum of genetics, the impossibility of acquired characteristics to be inherited, has fallen. Has anything left not overthrown? When I thought about this, I came up with only one universal law of biology (ULB), which still holds.