The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment
2000; Nature Portfolio; Volume: 6; Issue: 11 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1038/81288
ISSN1546-170X
Autores Tópico(s)Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Research
ResumoSoon we will know the sequence of the human genome, or some humans' genomes, anyway -and then what?The sequence alone will not tell us which parts function as genes, much less what those genes do.We are deluged by new knowledge in cell and molecular biology but, this book by evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin argues, we know much less than we would like to believe we do.The Triple Helix stands back to look at the whole of biology as we practice it at the turn of the century.A key question remains in development and evolution: how to explain variation.Genes may account for why you are different from a chimpanzee, but not for why you are different from me.Are we headed toward the answers?John Maynard Keynes once wrote, "The difficulty lies, not so much in developing new ideas, as in escaping from the old ones."This book takes on that difficult task for biology.Lewontin argues that we have come up against the constraints of the reigning metaphors in biology.Metaphors are necessary because we cannot see most of the things we study, but when we believe the thing actually is the metaphor, we are in trouble.We speak of genes as a blueprint, program or code, and so come to see development as the unfolding of a predeter-
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