Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

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Freedom lies in expressing your own determinism, not somebody else’s. It is not the determinism that makes a difference, but the ownership. Just as a photograph needs to be immersed in a bath of developer before the picture will appear, so the recipe for a chimpanzee, written in digital form in the genes of its egg, needs the correct milieu to become an adult – the nutrients, the fluids, the food and the care – but it already has the information to make a chimpanzee.

The environment that a child experiences is as much a consequence of the child’s genes as it is of external factors: the child seeks out and creates his or her own environment. If she is of a mechanical bent, she practises mechanical skills; if a bookworm, she seeks out books. The genes may create an appetite, not an aptitude. Chromosome 7 – Instinct A really great introduction to genetics. One of my friends, who studied chemistry in college, recommended the book to me. The book is divided into 23 chapters, representing the 23 different sets of chromosomes in the human body. The concept fascinated me, and I thought that if the author had enough of a sense of humor to write a book this way, why not give it a try?Book Genre: Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Health, History, Medical, Medicine, Nonfiction, Popular Science, Science Transgenic mice are scientific gold dust. They enable scientists to find out what genes are for and why. The inserted gene need not be derived from a mouse, but could be from a person: unlike in computers, virtually all biological bodies can run any kind of software. For instance, a mouse that is abnormally susceptible to cancer can be made normal again by the introduction of a human chromosome 18. Chromosome 19 – Prevention Not only does the apoptotic cull of neurons enable learning to take place, it also improves the average quality of the cells that remain. Something similar probably happens in the immune cells, another subject to ruthless culling of cells by apoptosis. a b Kealey, Terence (2000). "Book Review Genome:The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters". Nature. 24 (21): 21. doi: 10.1038/71638. PMID 10615121. Ridley, Matthew White (1983). Mating system of the pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 52225811. [ permanent dead link]

Our immune systems are set up in such a way that they ‘expect’ to be educated by soil mycobacteria early in childhood; when they are not, the result is an unbalanced system prone to allergy. This blew my mind. I had never thought about this. In Nature Via Nurture, Ridley covers this in greater detail. There was new, strong evidence against what Rich Harris calls ‘the nurture assumption’. Studies of the divorce rate of twins, for example, reveal that genetics accounts for about half of the variation in divorce rate, non-shared environmental factors for another half and shared home environment for nothing at all. In other words, you are no more likely to divorce if reared in a broken home than the average – unless your biological parents divorced. It is proteins that do almost every chemical, structural and regulatory thing that is done in the body: I wish I could give this book 6 stars! It's really fantastic, and I want to recommend it to EVERYONE, but in my heart I know the tone would bore some of my friends... I suggest thinking of the author/narrator as a cool guy you'd be friends with telling you all this information, instead of a nerdy/haughty *scientist* ...He's not a scientist, he's a writer & former editor, & this isn't a textbook, but it could be--he's done his research & includes all his references. Just slightly out-of-date (published in 1999) since genetics is such a fast-progressing area of knowledge but overall not "dated" or off-base.It’s mostly informative and tries hard to avoid reinforcing certain misconceptions — like the idea that a gene codes for a disease, or that things are as simple as a single gene coding for a single trait. A lot of the anecdotes are familiar to me from previous reading, but it’s still interesting to see them presented in this way. It’s pretty modern-human-centric: I mean, if you’re going to look at our autobiography of a species, then I think at least a little time needs to be given to the past of our species. People so often want to know how closely we’re related to Neanderthals. Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will. Chromosome 6 – Intelligence Pierre-Simon de LaPlace once mused that if, as a good Newtonian, he could know the positions and the motions of every atom in the universe, he could predict the future. Or rather, he suspected that he could not know the future, but he wondered why not.