>the impact of Levin’s work is a shift away from genes as the only determinant of structure Nobody was making the claim that genes are the only determinant of

>the impact of Levin’s work is a shift away from genes as the only determinant of structure Nobody was making the claim that genes are the only determinant of structure though. A trivial example is the mother's hormones affecting her child's development in utero. To cause a shift away from genes would require showing that the bioelectric network is not itself caused by genetic factors. Otherwise while it may be useful as a tool to develop treatments for developmental diseases it does not change that genes are the ultimate cause of the bioelectric network itself (except as when directly manipulated by scientists). Quoting Levin himself: >Evolution was using bioelectric signaling long before neurons and muscles appeared, to solve the problem of creating and repairing complex bodies.[0] It sounds like to me from this quote that bioelectric networks are not something outside of genetics but just another important biological system. It's hard to pin down what the author is really getting at in the first place. For example these two lines: >genes are great, and they do contain much of the necessary information for building our bodies. But they don’t contain all of it >[...] >Levin’s point is that genes are like machine code, and modern-day programmers never think about machine code—they think about higher-level software constructs like objects, modules, and applications. Yet machine code really is what is being executed by the computer. Nobody would say that the computer is really running c++, for example, or that c++ is a new "determinant of structure" of the program. It is completely subsumed by machine code. The author is the entire time equating a set of instructions (the genome) to a biological system (the "bioelectric network"). However it does not make sense to equate these things in the way the author has done it (at least not without a lot more elaboration). The genes do not really do anything except get copied and transcribed into mRNA while the bioelectric network clearly is doing something. So it really seems more like the author should be comparing proteins with the bioelectric network. But I think here the problem becomes much more obvious – there is no other way besides proteins for biological organisms to do work. So it is obvious that the bioelectric network is somehow formed by the work of proteins, and the proteins are themselves caused by genes. The human body has within it many systems: the circulatory system, the respiratory system, the endocrine system, the nervous system, the muscular system etc. These all exist at "higher levels of abstraction" than genes and some of them, like the endocrine system, play a role in development. But it wouldn't make sense to say that these system are "in competition" with the genome. Even though we can use the circulatory system to transport a drug to the body that changes the structure of the body. Another major difference is that genetics are continually showing their influence because the body is continually creating proteins from the genome. It sounds from the article that this bioelectric network is really only relevant at the developmental stage (if I am wrong here then I feel the article should have made that more explicit). Ultimately I feel the article is arguing a bit against a strawman of "genes as the only determinant of structure" and is also making too vague of a claim about genes having a new competitor, so to speak. [0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3