Matt Ridley - Genome the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters-HarperCollins

When genes are replicated, mistakes are sometimes made. A letter (base) is occasionally missed out or the wrong letter inserted. Whole sentences or paragraphs are sometimes duplicated, omitted or

Many mutations are neither harmful nor beneficial, for instance if they change one codon to another that has the same amino acid ‘meaning’: there are sixty-four different codons and only twenty amino acids, so many D N A ‘words’ share the same meaning. Human beings

They do not defy the second law of thermodynamics, which says that in a closed system everything tends from order towards disorder

Heredity is a modifiable stored program; metabolism is a universal machine

Tags: #evolution

Heredity is a modifiable stored program; metabolism is a universal machine. The recipe that links them is a code, an abstract message that can be embodied in a chemical, physical or even immaterial form

blend is because it involves more than one particle. In the early nineteenth

In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person’s job was more able to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure

The psychological precedes the physical. The mind drives the body, which drives the genome

mutations, bred them by the thousand and slowly sorted out all the ones

Natural selection has designed all parts of our bodies to last just long enough to see our children into independence, no more

Tags: #biology

Tissues that are especially prone to cancer tend to be tissues that do a lot of cell division throughout life either for repair or for other reasons: skin, testis, breast, colon, stomach, white blood cells