Since my sibling reply got voted up a lot, I want to follow up: it seems that not only is the question not wrong, the “dissolving” answer is itself wrong, or at least very misleading. (Naturally, I have to tread cautiously, since I’m not an Expert in this area.)
As I said in my other reply, the defining characteristic of life is its ability to maintain a low-entropy island against the entropizing forces of nature. So there must be some range of environments in which an organism (via genes) is able to produce the same phenotype regardless of where its environment falls within that range. In effect, the genes allow the phenotype to be “screened off” (d-separated, whatever) from its environment (again, within limits).
A thing that truly allows the environment equal influence in its final form as the thing itself (as suggested by the T&C answer) is not what we mean by “life”. It’s the hot water that eventually cools to a temperature somewhere between its current temperature and that of its initial environment. It’s the compressed gas molecules in the corner of a chamber that eventually spread out evenly throughout the chamber. It is, in short, not the kind of self-replicating, low entropy island we associate with life, and so has no basic units thereof, be they genes or memes.
So there must be some range of environments in which an organism (via genes) is able to produce the same phenotype regardless of where its environment falls within that range.
The organism needs to successfully thrive and reproduce within that range. Sometimes this means tailoring its phenotype to the environment it finds itself in.
But imagine a world in which environment truly was more determining than genes. Every animal born in a swamp would be a frog (no matter what its parents were) and every animal born in a tree would be a bird. Perhaps coloration or some other trait might be heritable — blue birds who move to swamps give rise to little blue tadpoles — but the majority of phenotypic features would be governed by the environment in which the organism is born and develops.
In our world, all we know about X is that it is a phenotypic feature, then we should expect it is more likely to be stable under different environments than to be stable under different genotypes. Features must owe more (on the aggregate) to genes than to environment. If it were otherwise, then we would not talk about species! We know we are not in the swamp-birds-have-tadpoles world.
When people talk about genes vs. environment, they usually aren’t really talking about all features. They’re usually talking about some particular, politically interesting set of features of humans …
Since my sibling reply got voted up a lot, I want to follow up: it seems that not only is the question not wrong, the “dissolving” answer is itself wrong, or at least very misleading. (Naturally, I have to tread cautiously, since I’m not an Expert in this area.)
As I said in my other reply, the defining characteristic of life is its ability to maintain a low-entropy island against the entropizing forces of nature. So there must be some range of environments in which an organism (via genes) is able to produce the same phenotype regardless of where its environment falls within that range. In effect, the genes allow the phenotype to be “screened off” (d-separated, whatever) from its environment (again, within limits).
A thing that truly allows the environment equal influence in its final form as the thing itself (as suggested by the T&C answer) is not what we mean by “life”. It’s the hot water that eventually cools to a temperature somewhere between its current temperature and that of its initial environment. It’s the compressed gas molecules in the corner of a chamber that eventually spread out evenly throughout the chamber. It is, in short, not the kind of self-replicating, low entropy island we associate with life, and so has no basic units thereof, be they genes or memes.
The organism needs to successfully thrive and reproduce within that range. Sometimes this means tailoring its phenotype to the environment it finds itself in.
Of course.
But imagine a world in which environment truly was more determining than genes. Every animal born in a swamp would be a frog (no matter what its parents were) and every animal born in a tree would be a bird. Perhaps coloration or some other trait might be heritable — blue birds who move to swamps give rise to little blue tadpoles — but the majority of phenotypic features would be governed by the environment in which the organism is born and develops.
In our world, all we know about X is that it is a phenotypic feature, then we should expect it is more likely to be stable under different environments than to be stable under different genotypes. Features must owe more (on the aggregate) to genes than to environment. If it were otherwise, then we would not talk about species! We know we are not in the swamp-birds-have-tadpoles world.
When people talk about genes vs. environment, they usually aren’t really talking about all features. They’re usually talking about some particular, politically interesting set of features of humans …