Quote of the Day: Waddington's Landscape

[timelets]

A good way to think about path-dependent phenomena:

https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/theprometheancell/waddington8217s_landscape_and_the_different

Waddington's Landscape gave me with a delicious moment of perfect understanding when I was a graduate student. I still haven't forgotten that feeling. As a testament to the metaphor's impact and endurance, it has adapted and reincarnated over the years to accommodate new theories1, and I often turn to it as a reference point when considering new reports and discoveries. I hope you will find this metaphor just as useful.

Conrad Hal Waddington introduced his concept2 in 1957 to summarize his meditations on the tenets of developmental biology and how genes guide development. I should point out that Waddington was working in the pre-DNA age but had the insight to recognize the limits of individual genes. His key contribution is noting the dynamics of gene expression regulation and ushering in the concept of epigenetics (more on this later, I promise). He took a systemic (I sometimes think humanistic) view of developmental genetics and understood that each gene is like an instrument in an orchestra, development is like a harmonious symphony, and each instrument must be played in a coordinated manner to produce the intended sounds.

He applied the same reasoning in his Landscape. It describes a ball, representing a stem cell, rolling down a hill marked by uneven slopes and valleys. In this metaphor, the hill represents the cell differentiation process and genes shape the features on that hill. All those slopes and valleys ultimately channel the ball towards a favored position at the bottom of the hill.

Related: 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine.