The discovery of DNA was the crowning achievement to a century of mechanistic, reductionist biology which firmly established the predominance of the genetic paradigm and of molecular biology. It gave rise to recombinant DNA research, whose very successes, in turn? completely undermined the foundations of the genetic paradigm. The new, post-recombinant DNA genetics signals the final demise of mechanistic biology, and is in accord with a diametrically opposite, organicist perspective emerging in the rest of science. Current practice and commercialization of gene biotechnology, however, are still (mis)guided by the old paradigm of the supposed constancy of DNA in the genome determining the characteristics of organisms in linear, additive fashion. And therein lies the real danger. I review the relevant findings of recombinant DNA research revealing the underlying fluidity of DNA, and the circular, multidirectional network linking all genes. This serves to bring out the hazards of current practices based on outmodified, discredited assumptions. I then present a new organicist view of the organism which properly embeds the fluidity of DNA in an interconnected, intercommunicating whole. This has profound implications for heredity and evolution.
