Just How Messy is the World?

Abstract: A view that is gaining in popularity in the philosophy of science is that the world is a mess (Waters 2019; Havstad 2017; McConwell 2017; Dupré 1993; Cartwright 1999). That is, the world that science describes is characterized by many, distinct structures. Philosophers of genetics have reached this conclusion by arguing that classical genetics and contemporary molecular genetics are distinct, theoretical and investigative frameworks that biologists employ for different purposes (Waters 1994, 2004, 2006; Weber Forthcoming). What’s remarkable is that despite the thoroughgoing pluralism that these authors embrace regarding classical and molecular genetics, they are nevertheless monistic when it comes to the explanatory and investigative significance of contemporary molecular genetics. I argue that the pluralism that characterizes molecular genetics is actually more radical than what authors have acknowledged. In fact, the world of genetics is messier in several ways. Authors have clarified and defended a number of different molecular gene concepts at play in biology, but all do not treat non-coding regulatory sequences as distinct genes. I argue this is a mistake. Non-coding regulatory regions are a distinct type of molecular gene for the purposes of annotating genome sequencing to make them searchable in large databases, like the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s GenBank. I argue further that the annotation practices of genomics databases represent genuine theoretical commitments about the structure of the biological world.