Genome: The Autobiography Of Species In 23 Chapters: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

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Gene mutations can lead to disease, and sometimes there is a balancing effect between resistance to one disease at the expense of being susceptible to another disease. While many believe that genetics proves biological determinism, Ridley will show that in fact free will is itself in the genes. By picking one newly discovered gene from each of the 23 human chromosomes and telling its story, Matt Ridley traces the history of our species and its ancestors.

Ridley was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford where he received a doctorate in zoology before commencing a career in journalism.Dawkins represents, to me, the high point of the scientist end; he does not pepper his books with interesting anecdotes and trivia, but concentrates on real theories and real dilemmas in science. What about the fact that male sperm has an agenda and that chemicals within enter the female's brain, lowering her sex drive and adjusting the timings of her menstrual cycle in an attempt to stop her mating with others? The book is accessible but does get progressively more difficult and there is quite a bit of genetic code mentioned, but most people will not have a problem understanding it since the book does educate so well. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Ridley perhaps stands in a much-needed middle ground between ‘deep’ scientists and ‘superficial’ journalists; but it is a middle-ground that I found fairly uninteresting. Bryson doesn’t pretend to be any kind of expert; rather, his journalistic background has honed his appreciation for the fascinating backstory, the compelling character, the revealing tidbit.And my very white mother would have been extremely surprised to see on the map that her forbears wandered around in central and northern Africa for thousands of years before making it up to the Balkans and then to the Baltic Sea and over into Finland and the British Isles. My only reservation about it, is the fact that it is already quite out of date due to the rate of increasing knowledge about genetics. Genes from different animals (including humans) are to a surprising extent actually interchangeable.

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. We often read that 98% of our genetic letters are in common with chimpanzees, and 97% with gorillas. The first chromosome, for example, contains our oldest genes, genes which we have in common with plants.The human genome—the complete set of human genes—comes packaged in twenty-three separate pairs of chromosomes. But, I was amazed to read that humans share exactly the same number and types of bones with chimpanzees, the same chemicals in our brains. Several years later, Miescher guessed that DNA is the stuff of heredity, “just as the words and concepts of all languages can find expression in 24–30 letters of the alphabet.