CEFISES Seminar: Azat Garaev, “Reductionism in contemporary developmental biology”

Series: Work-in-Progress

Speaker: Azat Garaev (UCLouvain)

Title: “Reductionism in contemporary developmental biology”

Abstract

The metaphor of the genetic program has played a central role in developmental biology since the rise of molecular biology. In this talk I am going to examine how this metaphor is connected with different forms of reductionism, focusing on its evolution from early molecular genetics to contemporary developmental biology. I begin by situating the discussion within philosophical debates on reductionism, with particular attention to explanatory strategies in molecular and developmental biology. I follow Sahotra Sarkar’s distinction between genetic reductionism, which assigns explanatory primacy to genes, and molecular or physical reductionism, which seeks to account for biological phenomena in terms of lower-level molecular mechanisms.

I then trace the emergence of the molecular biology paradigm in the 1960s and 1970s, highlighting how the notion of a genetic programme supported a gene-centric, algorithmic view of development. The subsequent discovery and formalisation of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) significantly complexified this picture, replacing linear genetic control with network-based models of regulation. I assess whether the GRN framework constitutes a departure from reductionism or rather its new form.

Finally, I consider recent research programmes that focus on the GRNs’ mechanisms of action, including the roles of protein stability, post-translational regulation, and extra-nuclear activities in transcription factor action. I suppose that these developments challenge the standard GRN paradigm and, with it, the genetic programme metaphor itself. Overall, I aim to clarify how contemporary developmental biology navigates between reductionist commitments and increasingly complex accounts of biological organisation.