The Gene

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
—Philip Larkin, “This Be The Verse”

A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick. This theory was most evocatively proposed by the physicist John Wheeler in the 1990s: “Every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely . . . from answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits . . . ; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin.”

These fragments are vastly more common than genes, resulting in yet another major idiosyncrasy of our genome: much of the human genome is not particularly human

our capacity to understand and manipulate human genomes alters our conception of what it means to be “human.”

The human genome contains about between twenty-one and twenty-three thousand genes that provide the master instructions to build, repair, and maintain humans.

The actual nature of the genetic code, it turns out, is astoundingly simple: there’s just one molecule that carries our hereditary information and just one code.

An organism is much more than its genes, of course, but to understand an organism, you must first understand its genes.

Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers—passageways—for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don’t think about what constitutes good or evil. They don’t care whether we are happy or unhappy. We’re just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them.

—Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

The blood of your parents is not lost in you.

—Menelaus, The Odyssey

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

—Philip Larkin, “This Be The Verse”

The tightness of genetic linkage, in short, was a surrogate for the physical proximity of genes on chromosomes: by measuring how often two features—blond-hairedness and blue-eyedness—were linked or unlinked, you could measure the distance between their genes on the chromosome