Weber, Marcel
(2006)
The Central Dogma as a Thesis of Causal Specificity.
Studies in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 28.
pp. 595-610.
Abstract
I present a reconstruction of F.H.C. Crick’s two 1957 hypotheses ‘Sequence Hypothesis’ and ‘Central Dogma’ in terms of a contemporary philosophical theory of causation. Analyzing in particular the experimental evidence that Crick cited, I argue that these hypotheses can be understood as claims about the actual difference-making cause in protein synthesis. As these hypotheses are only true if restricted to certain nucleicacids in certain organisms, I then examine the concept of causal specificity and its potential
to counter claims about causal parity of DNA and other cellular components. I first show that causal specificity is a special kind of invariance under interventions, namely
invariance of generalizations that range over finite sets of discrete variables. Then, I show that this notion allows the articulation of a middle ground in the debate over causal parity.
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