'The genome wager' at its midpoint: Implications for developmental biology.

Abstract

Prediction is a very important part of the business of scientific theories, and scientists like to make wagers. Back in 2009, two prominent biologists within the public arena entered into a gentleman's bet about the explanatory value of the genome. Lewis Wolpert believes that, by 2029, it will be possible to predict all the physical details of a complex organism by the knowledge of its genome. Rupert Sheldrake, conversely, insists that new scientific principles are needed to explain development. It is also over a decade since Sean Carroll formalized the cis-regulatory hypothesis of morphological evolution. This paradigm, whereby major changes in form are produced by small variations in regulatory DNA, is congruent with Wolpert's own understanding of the genome. Research conducted over the past decade, however, suggests that a gene-centred approach to developmental evolution may be fading, but there is still much to work on. Far from being eccentric, the wager's outcome could affect the future course of the field of developmental biology.