Common misunderstandings of genetics

During the latter half of the 20th century, the fields of genetics and molecular biology matured greatly, significantly
increasing understanding of biological heredity. As with other complex and evolving fields of knowledge, the public
awareness of these advances has primarily been through the mass media, and a number of common misunderstandings
of genetics have arisen. Common misunderstandings include the following ideas:
a) Every aspect of the biology of an organism can be predicted from its genes
b) Single genes code for specific anatomical or behavioral features
c) Genes are a blueprint of an organism's form and behavior
d) Genes are uninterrupted sections of DNA that only code for a single protein

Genetic determinism
While there are many examples of animals that display certain well-defined behaviour that is genetically
programmed, these examples have been extrapolated to a popular misconception that all patterns of behaviour, and more
generally the phenotype, are rigidly genetically determined. There is good evidence that some basic aspects of human
behavior, such as circadian rhythms are genetically-based, but it is clear that many other aspects are not.
In the first place, much phenotypic variability does not stem from genes themselves. For example:
a) Epigenetic inheritance. In the widest definition this includes all biological inheritance mechanisms that do not
change the DNA sequence of the genome. In a narrower definition it excludes biological phenomena such as the
effects of prions and maternal antibodies which are also inherited and have clear survival implications.
b) Learning from experience. This is obviously a very important feature of humans, but there is considerable
evidence of learned behavior in other animal species (vertebrates and invertebrates). There are even reports of
learned behavior in Drosophila larvae.

A gene for X
In the early years of genetics it was suggested that there might be "a gene for" a wide range of particular characteristics.
This was partly because the examples studied from Mendel onwards inevitably focused on genes whose effects could be
readily identified; partly that it was easier to teach science that way; and partly because the mathematics of evolutionary
dynamics is simpler if there is a simple mapping between genes and phenotypic characteristics.
These have led to the general perception that there is "a gene for" arbitrary traits,leading to controversy in particular cases
such as the purported "gay gene". However, in light of the known complexities of gene expression networks (and
phenomena such as epigenetics), it is clear that instances where a single gene "codes for" a single, discernible phenotypic
effect are rare, and that media presentations of "a gene for X" grossly oversimplify the vast majority of situations.

Genes as a blueprint
It is widely believed that genes provide a "blueprint" for the body in much the same way that architectural or mechanical
engineering blueprints describe buildings or machines. At a superficial level, genes and conventional blueprints share the
common property of being low dimensional (genes are organised as a one-dimensional string of nucleotides; blueprints are
typically two-dimensional drawings on paper) but containing information about fully three-dimensional structures.
However, this view ignores the fundamental differences between genes and blueprints in the nature of the mapping from
low order information to the high order object.
In the case of biological systems, a long and complicated chain of interactions separates genetic information
from macroscopic structures and functions. The following simplified diagram of causality illustrates this:
Genes → Gene expression → Proteins → Metabolic pathways → Sub-cellular structures → Cells → Tissues → Organs
→ Organisms
Even at the small scale, the relationship between genes and proteins (once thought of as "one gene, one polypeptide") is
more complicated, because of alternative splicing.
Also, the causal chains from genes to functionality are not separate or isolated but are entangled together, most obviously
in metabolic pathways (such as the Calvin and citric acid cycles) which link a succession of enzymes (and, thus, gene
products) to form a coherent biochemical system. Furthermore, information flow in the chain is not exclusively one-way.
While the central dogma of molecular biology describes how information cannot be passed back to inheritable genetic
information, the other causal arrows in this chain can be bidirectional, with complex feedbacks ultimately regulating gene
expression.
Instead of being a simple, linear mapping, this complex relationship between genotype and phenotype is not
straightforward to decode. Rather than describing genetic information as a blueprint, some have suggested that a more
appropriate analogy is that of a recipe for cooking, where a collection of ingredients is combined via a set of instructions to
form an emergent structure, such as a cake, that is not described explicitly in the recipe itself.

Genes as words
It is popularly supposed that a gene is a linear sequence of nucleotides along a segment of DNA that provides the coded
instructions for synthesis of RNA and even some current medical dictionaries define a gene as "a hereditary unit that
occupies a specific location on a chromosome, determines a particular characteristic in an organism by directing the
formation of a specific protein, and is capable of replicating itself at each cell division.
In fact, as the diagram illustrates schematically, genes are much more complicated and elusive concepts. A reasonable
modern definition of a gene is a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is
associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions and/or other functional sequence regions.
This kind of misperception is perpetuated when mainstream media report that an organism's genome has been
"deciphered" when they mean that it has simply been sequenced.