ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2014
Genes without prominence: a reappraisal of the foundations of biology.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Enzyme Catalytic Parameters and Evolution Across the Dissipation Plane.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Review
- Short- and Long-Term Evolution of Microbial Cultures: A Thermodynamic Perspective.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Theoretical Improvements in Enzyme Efficiency Associated with Noisy Rate Constants and Increased Dissipation.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Chiral conformity emerges from the least-time free energy consumption.Interface focus · 2023Article
- Cellular and Natural Viral Engineering in Cognition-Based Evolution.Communicative & integrative biology · 2023Review
- Walking on water: revisiting the role of water in articular cartilage biomechanics in relation to tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Review
- Non-Random Genome Editing and Natural Cellular Engineering in Cognition-Based Evolution.Cells · 2021Review
- A framework for parsing heritable information.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Towards a General Definition of Life.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2019Article
- Biological Relativity Requires Circular Causality but Not Symmetry of Causation: So, Where, What and When Are the Boundaries?Frontiers in physiology · 2019Review
- Crick's sequence hypothesis - a review.Communicative & integrative biology · 2019Review
- In the Beginning was a Mutualism - On the Origin of Translation.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2018Article
- Senomic view of the cell: SenomeCommunicative & integrative biology · 2018Review
- Cognition, Information Fields and Hologenomic Entanglement: Evolution in Light and Shadow.Biology · 2016Article
- Understanding of anesthesia - Why consciousness is essential for life and not based on genes.Communicative & integrative biology · 2016Article
- The history of ecoimmunology and its integration with disease ecology.Integrative and comparative biology · 2014Article
- The evolutionary origin of form and function.The Journal of physiology · 2014Review
- Simulating metabolism with statistical thermodynamics.PloS one · 2014Article
- Discourse on order vs. disorder.Communicative & integrative biologyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The sequencing of the human genome raises two intriguing questions: why has the prediction of the inheritance of common diseases from the presence of abnormal alleles proved so unrewarding in most cases and how can some 25 000 genes generate such a rich complexity evident in the human phenotype? It is proposed that light can be shed on these questions by viewing evolution and organisms as natural processes contingent on the second law of thermodynamics, equivalent to the principle of least action in its original form. Consequently, natural selection acts on variation in any mechanism that consumes energy from the environment rather than on genetic variation. According to this tenet cellular phenotype, represented by a minimum free energy attractor state comprising active gene products, has a causal role in giving rise, by a self-similar process of cell-to-cell interaction, to morphology and functionality in organisms, which, in turn, by a self-similar process entailing Darwin's proportional numbers are influencing their ecosystems. Thus, genes are merely a means of specifying polypeptides: those that serve free energy consumption in a given surroundings contribute to cellular phenotype as determined by the phenotype. In such natural processes, everything depends on everything else, and phenotypes are emergent properties of their systems.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.