I have been using OmniFocus since 2016 and from the very beginning have kept a running list of blog post ideas which I almost never use. “Write about Taleb’s VC quote” says an entry from October 11, 2024. More than a year later I did write about it, but not because I saw it on the list and have in fact only just now realized that it was on the list in the first place. The oldest active entry is from August 15, 2021: “Write about theoretical biology”. The second-oldest is from four days later: “Write about Waddington’s epigenetics”. This was a few months before I had read any of his books, so maybe it was just mine discovering what Waddington did? In any case, consider this post as a way to cross both of these tasks off the list.
And yet again, the writing is not prompted by any list, but rather by this question on X — what are the major breakthroughs in biology that were idea-driven arguments based on existing data — which duly reminded me of CH Waddington (or, as iOS 26 autocorrect misspelled it just before I had hit return, “CH Washington”). Waddington, a proponent of theoretical biology as a parallel to theoretical physics, organized symposia in the late 1960s on the topic. Alas, it never took off. He died in 1975, age 69, just in time to see research funding for experimental biology skyrocket making everyone an experimental biologist. The theoretical part is now mostly mathematics: see, for example, the Mathematical Oncology newsletter, but what Waddington proposed was not really maths. Interestingly enough the man behind the newsletter, Jeffrey West, has co-authored a paper with Taleb that was very Waddingtonian, with a recent follow-up and a whole book (which I am yet to read).
For an example of what Waddington wrote about see his most well-known work: the epigenetic landscape, proposed before we even knew what genes were. To me these were incredibly useful when thinking about differentiation of complex cells and how it can go sideways. It is also incredibly annoying that the term epigenetic has been hijacked by molecular biologists to mean solely chemical changes to DNA and adjacent proteins which are more likely than not merely a sideshow to what really controls gene expression (3d structure, mRNA, other genes, i.e. everything that goes into a gene regulatory network). Ask a doctor what epigenetics means and the first thing they say will be acetylation and methylation, and if they are oncologists they will talk about “epigenetic drugs” whose job is to inhibit methylation (“hypomethilators”), or what not. I would wager that GLP1 inhibitors like Ozempic are more epigenetic than the most active hypomethilator, but I may as well go after windmills.
Now, the person who asked the question that kickstarted this thinking is the founding editor of Assimov Press which is a charming publication about science and scientific progress. I hope his asking questions will lead to more writing about what happened to theoretical biology and that I’ll learn more about people who carried the flame (or, more likely, rediscovered the concept after everyone forgot about poor old Waddington).