Two new books by Matt Ridley, a science journalist specializing in life sciences, reveal the latest research in the field of the human genome and the most interesting question, how selfish genes are responsible for society and altruistic humans
By Avi Blizovsky
The genes are responsible for everything: this is the conclusion of two books by Matt Ridley that were published in a small difference by Zamora Beitan. These are the books "The Origin of Virtues" and "Genome".
These two books are separated by five years, and a real revolution in the field of the human genome and the understanding of the science of genetics. This revolution has not ended even today, when we know that we are climbing a new hill: the proteome - a system that seeks to understand not only how our genes are structured but also the connections between them, which seem to be mainly responsible for the difference between a human and an elephant or between a bacterium and a cloned fish.
Therefore, these two books can be seen as complementing each other on the historical puzzle, and especially when the origin of virtue stands on the thin seam between the genome and the phenotype: that is, between the genetic trait and the expression of this trait in humans.
But before that, did you know that man, and even more so a beehive or an anthill are in the bush? Yes. The human being consists of billions of cells, each of which includes within it a colony of genes, themselves composed of DNA molecules. With ants and bees there is even one more stage, the society where everyone specializes in a specific profession and cannot change it (worker ants, warriors, queens, etc.).
On the surface, all the genes in a person's body or an ant's body appear to cooperate with all the other genes, and the cells also cooperate with each other, when each cell in the body specializes in something different, but they all depend on each other. But how does this fit with genes being selfish? Well, these genes play a sort of non-zero-sum version of the prisoner's dilemma with each other. All these organizations led during evolution to perhaps the most complex and most enduring creation: human society. Society, Ridley quotes the Economist from January 1847, is a natural product of the instincts of individuals (p. 282), and he also concludes that selfish genes built our consciousness, but they built it to be social, reliable and cooperative.
Sometimes a journalist's point of view is needed to understand a complex and complicated subject like the human genome, especially when it comes to a person like Ridley, who was the American editor of The Economist (although in much later years, of course, than the year from which he brought the quote). Often, a new scientific bomb has landed on humanity that needs to be explained to the public (so for example in the last fifty years it was the atomic bomb, the first flights into space, the first flight to the moon, the tangible impacts of the damage to the environment and its results and of course the most topical issue is the decoding of the human genome.
Ridley took on a task that an active scientist would have difficulty with - taking a sample of traits hidden in one of the genes on each of the 23 chromosomes and explaining through them the enormous revolution in which the best scientists are investing their time and the best governments are investing their money.
The book contains interesting information also from the historical point of view DNA was first deciphered long before Watson and Crick were born, it was in 1869 by a Swiss doctor, Friedrich Miescher. He isolated the substance from the pus-soaked bandages of wounded soldiers at Teebengen in Germani. Misher himself guessed that DNA is probably the key to heredity and wrote to his uncle in 1862, with a miraculous vision, that it is possible that DNA carries the hereditary message, "just as the words and concepts of all languages can find expression in 24 to 30 letters of the alphabet.", but no DNA was found to have multiple followers, it was known to be a rather monotonous substance: how is it able to express a message using only four letters?
By the way, Watson and Crick, the duo that identified the mechanism and even deciphered the four chemical compounds that form the basis of the A, C, G, T cipher, it turns out that Francis Crick, had an intuition, which later turned out to be correct, regarding the existence of conductive RNA, and that the genetic code is without commas.
And another interesting fact, for those who think that the fact that great apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes and humans only 23 indicates an impassable buffer between them, here is the answer: gene number two, that is, the second largest gene in humans, is actually a combination of two medium-sized genes in great apes. Here, yes, the human from the ape is allowed, it is a very accidental mutation.
We will review here only the list of topics he deals with when the order of the genes is important - the serial number expresses the length of the chromosome, with the chromosome marked with 1 being the longest:
1. Life, 2. Humanity, 3. History, 4. Fate, 5. Environment, 6. Intelligence, 7. Instinct, 8. XY conflict, 9. Self-interest, 10. Disease, 11. Personality, 12. Self-assembly, 13. Prehistory . 14. Immortality. 15. Male and female. 16. Memory. 17. Death. 18. A salve. 19. Prevention. 20. Politics.
By the way, it was very difficult to find a representative gene for each chromosome, if only for the simple reason, which we have yet to decipher, that many traits are the result of interaction between the genes.
Both books are recommended and they give a beautiful picture of genetic research, and even social research, after all kinds of racist and other sediments have been subtracted from them. I recommend reading them.
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