2009 will be a big year for anniversaries: Lincoln, Darwin, Dr. Johnson, Gogol, Tennyson, Calvin, … and the humble gene.

The word was coined by the Danish geneticist Wilhelm Johanssen in 1909, to describe whatever it was that parents passed down to their offspring so that they developed the same traits. Johanssen, like other biologists of his generation, had no idea what that invisible factor was. But he thought it would be useful to have a way to describe it.

That’s from an exceptionally lucid article in the Science section of the New York Times. As the article makes clear, we are sailing into “post-classical” genetics, the genetics of 2009 resembling that of 1909 to about the same degree that 2009 physics looks like 1909 physics.

In this jungle of invading viruses, undead pseudogenes, shuffled exons and epigenetic marks, can the classical concept of the gene survive? It is an open question, one that Dr. Prohaska hopes to address at a meeting she is organizing at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico next March.

All that stuff happening in our cells is really, really complicated. It’s not just genes making proteins; it’s also genes making things that make proteins, and genes that make things that make things that make proteins, … and genes making useless garbage, and non-genes getting in the way of what the genes are trying to do, and …

Karl Popper used to grumble about “promissory materialism” — the loose way some scientists have of saying: “No, we have no clue what’s happening here — but we’ll figure it out, we promise!” I think that in a zone like this, where so little is known, and in a culture like this, fixated on the supernatural and broadly hostile to science, “promissory supernaturalism” is more vexatious: “Plainly we have no clue what’s happening here — no point in further inquiry!” … except that nothing is really promised, except despair and ignorance. I stand with Hilbert.