Posts tagged “Genome”
Reductionist isn’t an insult
From Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters: Oncology, the medical study of whole cancers, diligent, brilliant and massively endowed though it was, achieved terribly little by comparison with what has already been achieved in a few years by a reductionist, genetic approach.
Are symmetrical people smarter?
From Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters: Some asymmetries in the body are consistent: the heart is on the left side of the chest, for example, in most people. But other, smaller asymmetries can go randomly in either direction. In some people the left ear is larger than the right; in others, vice […]
An evolutionary history of very close things
From Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters: [T]he remarkable truth is that we come from a long line of failures. We are apes, a group that almost went extinct fifteen million years ago in competition with the better-designed [note: I take serious issue with this phrasing] monkeys. We are primates, a group of […]
Genome
I attended the very last lecture of my evolution class this semester last Friday. Like all the rest of the lectures, it was impossibly dull. This professor has made facts out of things I thought could never happen, like falling asleep during a lecture on sexual selection. Despite my professor’s best efforts, however, I’m still […]