Table of Contents
Preface
1 Life
2 Species
3 History
4 Fate
5 Environment
6 Intelligence
7 Instinct
X and Y Conflict
8 Self-Interest
9 Disease
10 Stress
11 Personality
12 Self-Assembly
13 Pre-History
14 Immortality
15 Sex
16 Memory
17 Death
18 Cures
19 Prevention
20 Politics
21 Eugenics
22 Free Will
Bibliography and Notes
Index
Forewords & Introductions
When I began to write this book, the human genome was still a largely an unexplored landscape. Some eight thousand human genes had already been roughly located, and I mention a few of the most interesting ones in the book, but the rapid acceleration towards the reading of the entire genome still lay in the future. Now, only a little over a year later, that gargantuan task is complete. Scientists all over the world have deciphered the entire human genome, written down its contents and distributed them on the internet to all who wish to read them. You can now download from the net the near-complete instructions for how to build and run a human body.
The revolution was swift. In early 1998, the publicly funded scientists who made up the Human Genome Project still predicted that they would take another seven years at least to read the entire human genome, and they had barely read 10% of it by then. Then suddenly a joker was thrown on the table. Craig Venter, a flamboyant and impatient scientist now working in the private sector, announced that he was forming a company and would do the job by 2001 and for a fraction of the cost: less than $200 million.
Venter had made such threats before, and he had a habit of delivering results. In 1991 he had invented a quick way to find human genes when everybody said it could not be done. Then in 1995 he received a withering reply to his request for a government grant to map a whole bacterial genome using a new `shotgun' technique. The technique would never work, said the officials. The letter arrived when the job was already almost complete.
So it would be a foolish person who bet against Venter a third time. The race was on. The public project was reorganised and refocused; extra funding was poured in and a goal was set to complete a first draft of the entire genome in June 2000. Venter soon set his sights on the same deadline.
On June 26, 2000, President Clinton in the White House and Tony Blair in Downing Street, simultaneously announced that the rough draft was complete. This is therefore an astonishing moment in human history: the first time in the story of life on earth that a species has read its own recipe. For the human genome is nothing less than the instructions for how to build and run a human body. Hidden within it, as I have tried to show in the book, lie thousands of genes and millions of other sequences that constitute a treasure trove of philosophical secrets. Most of the research into human genes is driven by the urgent need to find cures for both inherited diseases and much commoner diseases like cancer and heart disease, whose origin is abetted or enhanced by genes. A cure for cancer would, we now know, be virtually impossible if we did not understand the role of cancer genes and cancer-suppressing genes in the progress of tumours.
Yet there is much more to genetics than medicine. As I have tried to show, the genome contains secret messages from both the distant and the recent past—from when we were single-celled creatures and from when we took up cultural habits such as dairy farming. It also contains clues to ancient philosophical conundrums, not least the question of whether and how our actions are determined and what is this curious sensation called free will.
The completion of the genome project has done little to change this picture, but it is gradually adding more examples to the themes I explore in this book. As I wrote, I was conscious that the world was rapidly changing; genetic knowledge was exploding all about me in the scientific literature. I could do no more than capture the first glimpse of some of these exciting debates. But many great insights still lie in the future. Science, I believe, is the search for new mysteries, rather than the cataloguing of old facts. I have little doubt that there will be astounding surprises in store for us over the next few years. We are realising for the first time just how little we know about ourselves.
What I could not have foreseen is how dramatically the debate over genetics would have invaded the public media. With controversy raging over genetically modified organisms and with speculation growing about cloning and genetic engineering, the public is demanding the right to be heard. Quite correctly it does not want these decisions left only to the experts. But most geneticists are too busy mining nuggets of intellectual gold from the laboratory to give up their time to explaining their science to the public. So it falls to commentators like me to try to translate the arcane stories of genes into something more like entertainment than education.
I am an optimist. As will be clear from this book, I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge. To understand the molecular nature of cancer for the first time, to diagnose and prevent Alzheimer's disease, to discover the secrets of human history, to reconstruct the organisms that populated the pre-Cambrian seas—these seem to me to be immense blessings. It is true that genetics also brings the threat of new dangers—unequal insurance premiums, new forms of germ warfare, unanticipated side-effects of genetic engineering—but most of these are either easily dealt with or extremely far-fetched. So I cannot subscribe to the fashionable pessimism about science and nor can I warm to the idea of a world that turns its back on science and the unending assault on new forms of ignorance.
Matt Ridley
July 2000
Read an Excerpt
CHROMOSOME 1
Life
All forms that perish other forms supply' (By turns we catch the vital breath and die) Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne' They rise' they break' and to that sea return.
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
In the beginning was the word. The word proselytised the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever. The word discovered how to rearrange chemicals so as to capture little eddies in the stream of entropy and make them live. The word transformed the land surface of the planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise. The word eventually blossomed and became sufficiently ingenious to build a porridgy contraption called a human brain that could discover and be aware of the word itself.
My porridgy contraption boggles every time I think this thought. In four thousand million years of earth history' I am lucky enough to be alive today. In five million species, I was fortunate enough to be born a conscious human being. Among six thousand million people on the planet, I was privileged enough to be born in the country where the word was discovered. In all of the earth's history, biology and geography, I was born just five years after the moment when, and just two hundred miles from the place where, two members of my own species discovered the structure of DNA and hence uncovered the greatest, simplest and most surprising secret in the universe. Mock my zeal if you wish; consider me a ridiculous materialist for investing such enthusiasm in an acronym. But follow me on a journey back to the very origin of life, and I hope I can convince you of the immensefascination of the word.
'As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals; and many families of these animals long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life? asked the polymathic poet and physician Erasmus Darwin in 1794. It was a startling guess for the time' not only in its bold conjecture that all organic life shared the same origin, sixty-five years before his grandson Charles' book on the topic, but for its weird use of the word 'filaments'. The secret of life is indeed a thread.
Yet how can a filament make something live? Life is a slippery thing to define, but it consists of two very different skills: the ability to replicate' and the ability to create order. Living things produce approximate copies of themselves: rabbits produce rabbits, dandelions make dandelions. But rabbits do more than that. They eat grass' transform it into rabbit flesh and somehow build bodies of order and complexity from the random chaos of the world. They do not defy the second law of thermodynamics, which says that in a closed system everything tends from order towards disorder, because rabbits are not closed systems. Rabbits build packets of order and complexity called bodies but at the cost of expending large amounts of energy. In Erwin Schrodinger's phrase, living creatures 'drink orderliness' from the environment.
The key to both of these features of life is information. The ability to replicate is made possible by the existence of a recipe' the information that is needed to create a new body. A rabbit's egg carries the instructions for assembling a new rabbit. But the ability to create order through metabolism also depends on information -- the instructions for building and maintaining the equipment that creates the order. An adult rabbit, with its ability to both reproduce and metabolise, is prefigured and presupposed in its living filaments in the same way that a cake is prefigured and presupposed in its recipe. This is an idea that goes right back to Aristotle, who said that the 'concept' of a chicken is implicit in an egg, or that an acorn was literally 'informed' by the plan of an oak tree. When Aristotle's dim perception of information theory, buried under generations of chemistry and physics, re-emerged amid the discoveries of modern genetics' Max Delbruck joked that the Greek sage should be given a posthumous Nobel prize for the discovery of DNA.
The filament of DNA is information, a message written in a code of chemicals' one chemical for each letter. It is almost too good to be true' but the code turns out to be written in a way that we can understand. just like written English, the genetic code is a linear language, written in a straight line. just like written English' it is digital, in that every letter bears the same importance. Moreover' the language of DNA is considerably simpler than English, since it has an alphabet of only four letters, conventionally known as A, C, G and T.
Now that we know that genes are coded recipes, it is hard to recall how few people even guessed such a possibility. For the first half of the twentieth century, one question reverberated unanswered through biology: what is a gene? It seemed almost impossibly mysterious. Go back not to 19 5 3' the year of the discovery of DNA's symmetrical structure, but ten years further, to 1943. Those who will do most to crack the mystery' a whole decade later, are working on other things in 1943. Francis Crick is working on the design of naval mines near Portsmouth. At the same time James Watson is just enrolling as an undergraduate at the precocious age of fifteen at the University of Chicago; he is determined to devote his life to ornithology. Maurice Wilkins is helping to design the atom bomb in the United States. Rosalind Franklin is studying the structure of coal for the British government.
In Auschwitz in 1943, Josef Mengele is torturing twins to death in a grotesque parody of scientific inquiry.
Read a Sample Chapter
Chromosome 1
Life
All forms that perish other forms supply' (By turns we catch
the vital breath and die) Like bubbles on the sea of matter
borne' They rise' they break' and to that sea return.
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
In the beginning was the word. The word proselytised the sea with its
message, copying itself unceasingly and forever. The word discovered how
to rearrange chemicals so as to capture little eddies in the stream of
entropy and make them live. The word transformed the land surface of the
planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise. The word eventually
blossomed and became sufficiently ingenious to build a porridgy
contraption called a human brain that could discover and be aware of the
word itself.
My porridgy contraption boggles every time I think this thought. In four
thousand million years of earth history' I am lucky enough to be alive
today. In five million species, I was fortunate enough to be born a
conscious human being. Among six thousand million people on the
planet, I was privileged enough to be born in the country where the word
was discovered. In all of the earth's history, biology and geography, I was
born just five years after the moment when, and just two hundred miles
from the place where, two members of my own species discovered the
structure of DNA and hence uncovered the greatest, simplest and most
surprising secret in the universe. Mock my zeal if you wish; consider me a
ridiculous materialist for investing such enthusiasm in an acronym. But
follow me on a journey back to the very origin of life, and I hope I can
convince you of the immense fascination of the word.
'As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions
long before the existence of animals; and many families of these animals
long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the
same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?
asked the polymathic poet and physician Erasmus Darwin in 1794. It was
a startling guess for the time' not only in its bold conjecture that all
organic life shared the same origin, sixty-five years before his grandson
Charles' book on the topic, but for its weird use of the word 'filaments'. The
secret of life is indeed a thread.
Yet how can a filament make something live? Life is a slippery thing to
define, but it consists of two very different skills: the ability to replicate'
and the ability to create order. Living things produce approximate copies
of themselves: rabbits produce rabbits, dandelions make dandelions. But
rabbits do more than that. They eat grass' transform it into rabbit flesh and
somehow build bodies of order and complexity from the random chaos of
the world. They do not defy the second law of thermodynamics, which
says that in a closed system everything tends from order towards
disorder, because rabbits are not closed systems. Rabbits build packets
of order and complexity called bodies but at the cost of expending large
amounts of energy. In Erwin Schrodinger's phrase, living creatures 'drink
orderliness' from the environment.
The key to both of these features of life is information. The ability to
replicate is made possible by the existence of a recipe' the information
that is needed to create a new body. A rabbit's egg carries the
instructions for assembling a new rabbit. But the ability to create order
through metabolism also depends on information -- the instructions for
building and maintaining the equipment that creates the order. An adult
rabbit, with its ability to both reproduce and metabolise, is prefigured and
presupposed in its living filaments in the same way that a cake is
prefigured and presupposed in its recipe. This is an idea that goes right
back to Aristotle, who said that the 'concept' of a chicken is implicit in an
egg, or that an acorn was literally 'informed' by the plan of an oak tree.
When Aristotle's dim perception of information theory, buried under
generations of chemistry and physics, re-emerged amid the discoveries of
modern genetics' Max Delbruck joked that the Greek sage should be
given a posthumous Nobel prize for the discovery of DNA.
The filament of DNA is information, a message written in a code of
chemicals' one chemical for each letter. It is almost too good to be true'
but the code turns out to be written in a way that we can understand. just
like written English, the genetic code is a linear language, written in a
straight line. just like written English' it is digital, in that every letter bears
the same importance. Moreover' the language of DNA is considerably
simpler than English, since it has an alphabet of only four letters,
conventionally known as A, C, G and T.
Now that we know that genes are coded recipes, it is hard to recall how
few people even guessed such a possibility. For the first half of the
twentieth century, one question reverberated unanswered through biology:
what is a gene? It seemed almost impossibly mysterious. Go back not to
19 5 3' the year of the discovery of DNA's symmetrical structure, but ten
years further, to 1943. Those who will do most to crack the mystery' a
whole decade later, are working on other things in 1943. Francis Crick is
working on the design of naval mines near Portsmouth. At the same time
James Watson is just enrolling as an undergraduate at the precocious
age of fifteen at the University of Chicago; he is determined to devote his
life to ornithology. Maurice Wilkins is helping to design the atom bomb in
the United States. Rosalind Franklin is studying the structure of coal for
the British government.
In Auschwitz in 1943, Josef Mengele is torturing twins to death in a
grotesque parody of scientific inquiry.
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