Sunday, July 24, 2005
Grandeur in this view of life
"…as more and more is learned about the complexities of these processes, the concept of 'the gene' as a reified DNA sequence tends to dissolve. What exists, as one molecular biologist put it, is not a set of discrete genes, but an entire genome. And what evolves is neither a set of genes nor a given static phenotype, but a developmental system, embedded as that system is in an even broader web of interactions with its fluctuating environment - the famous 'tangled bank' of hedgerow species that Darwin invokes in the closing paragraph of The Origin".
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