What Makes You Who You Are

The never-failing debate about nature and elevationwhich is the to a greater extent potent shaper of the benignant essence? is perennially rekindled. It flared up once more(prenominal) in the London Observer of Feb. 11, 2001. REVEALED THE clandestine OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR, read the banner headline. ENVIRONMENT, not GENES, KEY TO OUR ACTS. The source of the story was Craig tummy, the successful man of genes who had built a close company to read the full grade of the tender-hearted genome in competition with an foreign consortium funded by taxes and charities.That sequencea string of 3 billion letters, sedate in a four-letter alphabet, containing the complete convention for building and running a world bodywas to be published the genuinely next day (the competition finish in an arranged tie). The first outline of it had revealed that there were moreover 30,000 genes in it, not the 100,000 that many had been estimating until a few months before. expatiate had already been circulated to journalists under embargo. But Venter, by speaking to a reporter at a biotechnology conference in France on Feb. , had effectively broken the embargo. not for the first time in the more and more bitter rivalry over the genome project, Venters reading material of the story would hit the headlines before his rivals. We patently do not have full genes for this idea of biological determinism to be right, Venter told the Observer. The wonderful diversity of the gentleman species is not hard-wired in our genetic code. Our environments are critical. In truth, the number of human genes changed nothing.Venters remarks concealed ii whopping nonsequiturs that fewer genes implied more environmental influences and that 30,000 genes were too few to explain human nature, whereas 100,000 would have been enough. As one scientist regurgitate it to me a few weeks later, just 33 genes, each coming in ii varieties (on or off), would be enough to name every human being in the wor ld unique. There are more than 10 billion combinations that could come from flipping a coin 33 times, so 30,000 does not seem such a pocket-size number after all.Besides, if fewer genes meant more free will, fruit flies would be freer than we are, bacteria freer still and viruses the John Stuart hero of biology. Fortunately, there was no need to still the population with such modern calculations. spate did not weep at the mortify news that our genome has only about doubly as many genes as a worms. Nothing had been hung on the number 100,000, which was just a bad guess. But the human genome projectand the decades of research that preceded itdid force a much more nuanced understanding of how genes work.In the archaean days, scientists detailed how genes encode the various proteins that get up the cells in our bodies. Their more sophisticated and ultimately more satisfying breakthroughthat gene expression can be modified by experiencehas been step by step emerging since the 1 980s. Only now is it come home on scientists what a big and habitual idea it implies that learning itself consists of nothing more than switching genes on and off. The more we trick up the lid on the genome, the more penetrable to experience genes appear to be.