When Aristode’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. This is an idea that goes right back to Aristode, 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.

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. But the ability to create order through metabolism also depends on information – the instructions for building and maintaining the equipment that creates the order. A rabbit’s egg carries the instructions for assembling a new rabbit. The ability to replicate is made possible by the existence of a recipe, the information that is needed to create a new body.

The key to both of these features of life is information. It will help you understand what this scientific milestone means for you, for your children, and for humankind.

From Huntington's disease to cancer, from the applications of gene therapy to the horrors of eugenics, Ridley probes the scientific, philosophical, and moral issues arising as a result of the mapping of the genome. By picking one newly discovered gene from each pair of chromosomes and telling its story, Matt Ridley recounts the history of our species and its ancestors from the dawn of life to the brink of future medicine. Genome offers extraordinary insight into the ramifications of this incredible breakthrough. Questions that will affect the rest of your life. Questions that will profoundly impact the way we think about disease, about longevity, and about free will. But what does it mean? Matt Ridley's Genome is the book that explains it all: what it is, how it works, and what it portends for the futureĪrguably the most significant scientific discovery of the new century, the mapping of the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that make up the human genome raises almost as many questions as it answers.

He addresses not only the ethical quandaries faced by contemporary scientists but the reductionist danger in equating inheritability with inevitability.' - The New Yorker 'Ridley leaps from chromosome to chromosome in a handy summation of our ever increasing understanding of the roles that genes play in disease, behavior, sexual differences, and even intelligence.

Genome by matt ridley