Genome wager between Lewis Wolpert and Rupert Sheldrake
In the spirit of famous scientific wagers by notable scientists, such as Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman, two leading biologists, Professor Lewis Wolpert and Dr Rupert Sheldrake, have set up a wager on the predictive value of the genome.The wager will be decided on May 1, 2029, and if the outcome is not obvious, the Royal Society, the world's most venerable scientific organization, will be asked to adjudicate. The winner will receive a case of fine port, Quinta do Vesuvio, 2005, which should have reached perfect maturity by 2029 and is being stored in the cellars of The Wine Society.
Prof Wolpert bets that the following will happen. Dr Sheldrake bets it will not: By May 1, 2029, given the genome of a fertilized egg of an animal or plant, we will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that develops from it, including any abnormalities.
Prof Wolpert and Dr Sheldrake agree that at present, given the genome of an egg, no one can predict the way an embryo will develop. The wager arose from a debate on the nature of life between Wolpert and Sheldrake at the 2009 Cambridge University Science Festival.Prof Wolpert believes that all biological phenomena can in principle be explained in terms of DNA, proteins and other molecules, together with their interactions. He is convinced that it is only a matter of time before all the details of an organism can be predicted on the basis of the genome.
Dr Sheldrake believes that the predictive value of genes is grossly over-rated. Genes enable organisms make proteins, but they do not contain programs or blueprints. Instead, he thinks that the development of organisms depends on organizing fields called morphogenetic fields, which are not inherited through the genes.
Famous scientific wagers in the past include Richard Feynman's bet of$1000 that no-one could construct a motor no bigger than 1/64 of an inch on a side. He lost. Stephen Hawking bet fellow cosmologist Kip Thorne that Cygnus X-1 would turn out not to be a black hole (Hawking lost). And in 1980 biologist Paul Erlich bet economist Julian Simon that the price of five mineral commodities would rise over the next ten years. In fact they fell.
The wager will be reported in full in The New Scientist on 9 July where there will also be articles stating their cases by both Prof Wolpert and Dr Sheldrake. Lewis Wolpert's book How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives of Cells is published by Faber and Faber and the new edition of Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life is published by Icon Books.
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Rupert Sheldrake is not exactly a leading biologist. He studies psychic pets amongst other things.
That said Wolpert might be wrong simply because he's overly optimistic with his date of 2029.
Depends on what "all the details" means -- major details yes, but things like exact shades of colours no.
But if it's going to happen, it'll be that housefly that keeps getting its eyes and legs switched in the lab!
Hmmm... I really wish that a non-crackpot had taken a slightly different wager with Wolpert. There is a very good reason to believe that Wolpert's prediction is wildly wrong: the genes that any given cell expresses are not determined soley by the genome, but also by epigenetic switches, which the developmental environment helps to set. Unless Wolpert's position is overstated in this post, I'm actually quite surprised that he would make that bet... I would think that he would be aware of the crucial role of the environment.
no mention of the prize for the Hawking/Thorne wager?!!? for shame, that's the best part!
per Hawking's mention of it in aBHoT, Thorne won a 1-year subscription to the 'gentlemans' magazine of his choosing. yesss.
I certainly hope they define this more carefully somewhere. "all the details" seems so vast and ambiguous that it may be unattainable under any circumstance.
Are we talking about detecting the color of a kitten's eyes and fur or are we talking about things like the cat's personality, lifespan, etc.?
St. Andrew: "Cigar Aficianado" ?
Modern Drunkard, certainly.
Sheldrake's a loon. Wolpert will probably get his wine in 20 years, while Sheldrake gets publicity for his crackpottery now.
The bet should really have been on whether or not there will be any evidence of 'Morphogenetic fields' in 20 years.
More on Sheldrake:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/06/the_sheldrake_phenomenon.php
My money is on Sheldrake.
Sheldrake is a crackpot. He is an interesting example of a crackpot in that he at one point did good work in biochemistry. But he hasn't done anything other than outright pseudoscience for at least 30 years now. Unfortunately, there's a decent chance that Wolpert will lose this bet. And losing it to Sheldrake will just give Sheldrake more credibility. Making this bet with him was therefore a bad idea.
This is a crazy bet for Wolpert. It is well known that expression patterns can differ in genetically identical beings, even in simple ones like fruit flies. Unless the specification of "all the details" is at a very gross level, Wolpert will lose.
Loon or not, there's enough dissent among what the probable outcome will be, even just here in the comments thread, that it makes the bet an interesting one, no?
Pity I doubt I'll be alive in 2029 to see the outcome.
Agreed with Joshuaz. I think Wolpert will lose.
Many, many big assumptions in this wager. The first, and most obvious, that I can think of, is whether you count the epigenetic code of the animal as part of the genetic code; whether the genes are active or inactive, which can be inherited from parents and affected by environment. Wikipedia's page is pretty solid, skip down to the "functions and consequences" section. Right there, Wolpert is going to run into trouble.
That, and "all the details" is a remarkably general comment. I hope that between themselves they've decided on the level of accuracy that this requires. I'm thinking here mostly of the major identifiers of fingerprints or retinal scans, which are largely developmentally-determined.
There is a surprising amount of flexibility based on conditions in the womb, egg, or seed.
The wager also depends on the fundamentalists not getting either of both of them A Cask of Amontillado in the meantime.
Do they get to pick the egg? Wolpert has already lost if the egg is an aligator. Recall that sex in aligators is determined by the incubation temperature of the egg. So something as fundamental as boy bits or girl bits can't be determined by the DNA alone.
Identical twins that originate from the same embryo develop differences that can be obvious to the naked eye by birth.
Unless the judge of this bet is especially generous with that "all the details" qualifier, Wolpert has already lost.
Why will any of this matter? As a post singularity intelligence I cannot see wasting any cycles with the ingredients of a meat bag or their silly bets.
@Brainspore @Hank
Wolpert isn't necessarily screwed - the critical text in the bet is "in at least one case"
So my reading of the bet here is that Wolpert wins as long as he can find a single example where outcome can be determined by examination of the genome. So as long as we've found a species of plant or animal whose development is relatively unaffected by its environment, then he's won the bet.
The bet will not be won with an alligator egg, nor a human. If genetic determination wins out, it will probably be in a relatively simple organism.
It would be cooler if it was meant in a broader sense. Like, based on a string of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts, you could figure out the anatomy and even the instinctive behaviors of the developed organism. That seems ridiculously ambitious, though...
Moriarty, that's not just ambitious it is likely impossible. First, presumably one would at minimum need the mitochrondial DNA as well. But even then that doesn't help you. How the DNA is interpreted is heavily dependent on what proteins are already present. One could conceivably have two completely different species with identical DNA but with different protein complements in their cells which when passed down the germ line make all the difference. Unlikely but technically possible. One doesn't need that sort of extreme situation to simply not have enough data solely in the DNA.
Sheldrake's explanation is wrong but his bet is right. The next 20 years biologists will make more advances that show why his bet is right than they do getting us closer to predicting all the details of the organism from the genome sequence.
First, Sheldrake is not a leading biologist, he's a leading idiot. But he is going to win this bet, because Wolpert is being the idiot here. He's ignoring the effects of development, which is really stupid since evo-devo is a hot field right now and he should know about it.
Sheldrake cops far too much short shrift for going out on a limb. If nobody was prepared to investigate obscure and unpopular angles, we'd forever be stuck in the first outmoded paradigm we came across.
I wonder how many of his vitriolic critics have read A New Science Of Life... sure, it may well be a steaming pile of crap, but at least Sheldrake's prepared to look outside the square and try to answer questions that have languished in the too hard basket. And his hypothesis does seem fairly promising if you actually try it on.
And although some experiments designed to test it fail to confirm it, aren't there others with some spooky results in favour of it? And the weird stuff about how long new molecules take to form, did he just make that up?
#4, St.Andrew:
Hawking & Thorne apparently went on to jointly lose another wager against John Preskill, the prize in this case being a baseball encyclopaedia.
Feynman never wagered that "no-one could construct" a motor no bigger than 1/64 of an inch on a side. He offered a prize of $1000 for the first person to do so, which was won by William McLellan in 1960.
Michael Gottlieb
Physics Department
California Institute of Technology
Quite interesting the vitriol that Dr. Sheldrake's views generate amongst some.
For others like me, he is a brave and compassionate scientist, who is able to adroitly communicate, and demonstrate, how there is much more going on here than what meets the purely materialist eye.
I see Sheldrake, Radin, Abraham and others as the Galileos of our time.
I'm honoured to be helping organize a lecture by Dr. Sheldrake and his wife Jill Purce here in Vancouver in one week: Friday July 17th. Please join us if you'll be in the Vancouver area. All welcome.
Full details:
http://sheldrakepurcevancouver.org
peace.
Andy
#17 Anonymous: Why will any of this matter? As a post singularity intelligence I cannot see wasting any cycles with the ingredients of a meat bag or their silly bets.
Wow. Nice.
#26: Why is it that people who use the word "vitriol" to describe criticism never have anything intelligent to say?
Wolpert's mistake is similar to that of the universal determinist (i.e. if you know every atom, it's location, momentum, etc you can predict the future). The problem is that the complexity becomes so great that the only "simulation" that for sure doesn't diverge from the real system is the real system itself. See this post for more detail:
Encoding Life's Complexity
The question is, will we be able to simulate the recursively unfolding environment by 2029 with computing power available then. If you believe the double-exponential arguments proffered by Kurzweil, et al, then Wolpert may win.
There is this violent hostility towards Sheldrake and his ideas - people may well see him as a sort of thinking man's David Icke, desperately searching for a reality a few feet above the nasty old bottom line, but he simply is an eminent biologist, despite the seeming eccentricity of his work, and he uses his authority to attack the complacement misconception that science has almost fully explained our universe and our part in it - his fiercest critics always justify their ferocity on the grounds that they are defending the rational against the irrational, as if they have no agenda or prejudices themselves, and this I find most doubtful of all.