Peak Gene

Interesting article.

We have reached peak gene, and passed it.

Ken Richardson in "It's The End Of The Gene As We Know It" 

In scientific, as well as popular descriptions today, genes “act,” “behave,” “direct,” “control,” “design,” “influence,” have “effects,” are “responsible for,” are “selfish,” and so on, as if minds of their own with designs and intentions.

But at the same time, a counter-narrative is building, not from the media but from inside science itself.... Scientists now understand that the information in the DNA code can only serve as a template for a protein. It cannot possibly serve as instructions for the more complex task of putting the proteins together into a fully functioning being, no more than the characters on a typewriter can produce a story.

...

First, laboratory experiments have shown how living forms probably flourished as “molecular soups” long before genes existed. They self-organized, synthesized polymers (like RNA and DNA), adapted, and reproduced through interactions among hundreds of components. That means they followed “instructions” arising from relations between components, according to current conditions, with no overall controller: compositional information, as the geneticist Doron Lancet calls it.
In this perspective, the genes evolved later, as products of prior systems, not as the original designers and controllers of them. More likely as templates for components as and when needed: a kind of facility for “just in time” supply of parts needed on a recurring basis.

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We have traditionally thought of cell contents as servants to the DNA instructions. But, as the British biologist Denis Noble insists in an interview with the writer Suzan Mazur, “The modern synthesis has got causality in biology wrong … DNA on its own does absolutely nothing until activated by the rest of the system … DNA is not a cause in an active sense. I think it is better described as a passive data base which is used by the organism to enable it to make the proteins that it requires.”

PS: the proposed definition of "gene" by Portin and Wilkins:

A gene is a DNA sequence (whose component segments do not necessarily need to be physically contiguous) that specifies one or more sequence-related RNAs/proteins that are both evoked by Genetic Regulatory Networks and participate as elements in Genetic Regulatory Networks, often with indirect effects, or as outputs of Genetic Regulatory Networks, the latter yielding more direct phenotypic effects.

Wiki tells us: A genetic regulatory network (GRN) is a collection of molecular regulators that interact with each other and with other substances in the cell to govern the gene expressionlevels of mRNA and proteins.