Dna Genetics Quotes

I was drawn to horses as if they were magnets. It was in my blood. I must have inherited from my grandfather a genetic proclivity toward the equine species. Perhaps there's a quirk in the DNA that makes horse people different from everyone else, that instantly divides humanity into those who love horses and the others, who simply don't know.

Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. . . .

Genetic code is a divine writing.

Unhappiness can be like a virus spreading from one person, to the next person, to the next one and so on. When someone is mean or rude to you, do not let their unhappiness infect your own life. If you are the unhappy one, please quarantine yourself so you do not infect others!

The Universe and Spirit do not understand limitations...PEOPLE invented limitations!

You inherit your environment just as much as your genes.

Meditation works in many layers. It works in our genes, in our DNA

Our highest contribution is making this world peaceful and happy. That comes when we can radiate peace and harmony from every cell, gene and DNA of our body.

Exactly right—folded quietly and knitted in right along with the working DNA there is a shadow self. This won’t surprise poets. We carry our own genetic doubles, at least in part.

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

Our DNA does not fade like an ancient parchment; it does not rust in the ground like the sword of a warrior long dead. It is not eroded by wind or rain, nor reduced to ruin by fire and earthquake. It is the traveller from an ancient land who lives within us all.

I love you,” he said again, like a creed. “I love you so thoroughly it feels like you’re in my DNA. Like you must be part of my genetic code because there’s no part of me that isn’t linked to you. My love for you is so consuming on the inside that there’s barely room.

Those Who From Heaven To Earth Came". They landed on Earth, colonized it, mining the Earth for gold and other minerals, establishing a spaceport in what today is the Iraq-Iran area, and lived in a kind of idealistic society as a small colony. They returned when Earth was more populated and genetically interfered in our indigenous DNA to create a slave-race to work their mines, farms, and other enterprises in Sumeria, which was the so-called Cradle of Civilization in out-dated pre-1980s school history texts. They created Man, Homo Sapiens, through genetic manipulation with themselves and ape man Homo Erectus.

Enlightenment is making every cell, gene and DNA as the radiator of peace and harmony.

Studies of the interaction between genetic and environmental risks are pinpointing critical parts of our health that derive from environmental variables.

It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different. This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss. Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one. For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck. By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry. Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.

To the question of whether sharing 96% of our genetic make-up with chimps makes us 96 percent chimp; we also share about 50% of our DNA with bananas - that does not make us half bananas!

The contrast between genetic and environmental, between nature and nurture, is not a contrast between fixed and changeable. It is a fallacy of biological determinism to say that if differences are in the genes, no change can occur.

Or, if you want to go just a wee bit deeper, we could talk about the nature of freedom itself. Does freedom mean that you are allowed to do whatever you want to do? Or we could talk about all the limiting influences in your life that actively work against your freedom. Your family genetic heritage, your specific DNA, your metabolic uniqueness, the quantum stuff that is going on at a subatomic level where only I am the always-present observer. Or the intrusion of your soul's sickness that inhibits and binds you, or the social influences around you, or the habits that have created synaptic bonds and pathways in your brain. And then there's advertising, propaganda, and paradigms. Inside that confluences of multifaceted inhibitors," she sighed, "what is freedom really?

Just ten years ago, probably the most prominent atheist of the twentieth century, Antony Flew, concluded that a God must have designed the universe. It was shocking news and made international headlines. Flew came to believe that the extraordinarily complex genetic code in DNA simply could not be accounted for naturalistically. It didn’t make logical sense to him that it had happened merely by chance, via random mutations. It is a remarkable thing that Flew had the humility and intellectual honesty to do a public about-face on all he had stood for and taught for five decades.

Thinking is contagious … so choose whom you surround yourself with carefully! Or at least take precautions so as not to infect yourself with other people’s thinking!

I think that the formation of [DNA's] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years.

Genetic research shows that the medical model is all wrong when it comes to psychological problems.

The more you treat your body and the cells as intelligent being the more you will be sharp, quick, competent, and fulfilled.

Today, we have discovered that everyone is born with dozens of genetic glitches. There are no perfect human specimens. But not all our glitches are the same, so one treatment often does not fit all sufferers of a given disease.

While genes are pivotal in establishing some aspects of emotionality, experience plays a central role in turning genes on and off. DNA is not the heart’s destiny; the genetic lottery may determine the cards in your deck, but experience deals the hand you can play. Scientists have proven, for example, that good mothering can override a disadvantageous temperament.

Walking to the subway, Aomame kept thinking about the strangeness of the world. If, as the dowager had said, we were nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn’t our genetic purpose – to transmit DNA – be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating? Did it benefit the genes in any way for us to lead such intricately warped, even bizarre, lives? … how could it possibly profit the genes to have such people existing in this world? Did the genes merely enjoy such deformed episodes as colorful entertainment, or were these episodes utilized by them for some greater purpose?

In addition to single-gene genetic disorders, there are just five causes of all disease: poor diet, chronic stress, microbes, toxins, and allergens, all of which wash over our DNA causing changes in our gene expression, and turning off or on different genes and messages that affect our metabolism.

[...] Deep within, her female organs began to contract and release. She felt the path of his seed and now in her mind she could see a golden trail. How was this even possible? Dear God, how was any of this even possible? Now she could see the chrysalis of her genetic material, a bright burning light at the end of a tunnel. The imagery made her smile then laugh. She could see his sperm, like lightning [...] If his DNA wanted to make a child, why wouldn't it move at an accelerated rate? She felt the moment when her egg received his sperm and their child began all the fantastic portentous crazy cell replications. [...]

It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.

Prior to the genome revolution, I, like most others, had assumed that the big genetic clusters of populations we see today reflect the deep splits of the past. But in fact the big clusters today are themselves the result of mixtures of very different populations that existed earlier.

In fact, genetic medicine has brought the problems of rare genetic conditions right to my own door.

However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.

We are connected to other human beings on this earth– genetically, historically,' Winn says. 'It's like magnets, I may not know where the other end of the magnet is, but I'm being pulled to it. How can we answer anything about ourselves if we don't know what our roots are, if we don't know who are people are?

Genetics, not lack of willpower, is the major reason why people differ in BMI. Success and failure, credit and blame, in overcoming problems should be calibrated relative to genetic strengths and weaknesses.

Discoveries about genetics are not limited to just those 6,000 conditions of a strongly hereditary nature, however. We are now in the midst of a genetic revolution that will touch all of us in numerous ways:

Genetically speaking, we are one people. The two most seemingly different people in the world are virtually identical from the point of their genes.φ At most, about one in a thousand nucleotides in our DNA are different between the blackest and the whitest, the tallest and the shortest of us. We are 99.9 percent the same. We are one tribe, one family, but have yet to recognize it. We humans are all intimately interconnected. How we treat each other matters to the health and well-being, perhaps even the survival, of us all as a species, not in some vague future, but in this very moment.

When you are relaxed about where you are at in life, things tend to flow more fluidly. It is as if you poke three holes in a bucket of water. The same amount of water is going to flow out the holes whether you let it flow or you shake the bucket. The difference is the amount of turmoil on the inside of the bucket!

Not sleeping enough, which for a portion of the population is a voluntary choice, significantly modifies your gene transcriptome—that is, the very essence of you, or at least you as defined biologically by your DNA. Neglect sleep, and you are deciding to perform a genetic engineering manipulation on yourself each night, tampering with the nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health story.

The irony is too rich not to point out. When arranging the different human races in tiers, from just below the angels to just above the brutes, smug racialist scientists of the 1800s always equated black skin with ‘subhuman’ beasts like Neanderthals. But facts is facts: pure Nordic Europeans carry far more Neanderthal DNA than any modern African.

Did you know that only a tiny minority of viruses cause illness in humans? No one knows how many viruses there are, but their real role, when you get right down to it, is to aid in mutations, to create diversity among life forms. I've read a lot of books on the subject-when you don't need much sleep you have a lot of time to read-and I can tell you that if it weren't for viruses, mankind would never have evolved on this planet. Some viruses get right inside the DNA and change your genetic code, did you know that? And no one can say for sure that HIV, for example, won't one day prove to have been rewriting our genetic code in a way that's essential to our survival as a race. I'm a man who consciously commits murders and scares the hell out of people and makes them reconsider everything, so I'm definitely malignant, yet I think I play a necessary role in this world.

Making Genetic Changes We used to think that genes created disease and that we were at the mercy of our DNA. So if many people in someone’s family died of heart disease, we assumed that their chances of also developing heart disease would be pretty high. But we now know through the science of epigenetics that it’s not the gene that creates disease but the environment that programs our genes to create disease—and not just the external environment outside our body (cigarette smoke or pesticides, for example), but also the internal environment within our body: the environment outside our cells. What do I mean by the environment within our body? As I said previously, emotions are chemical feedback, the end products of experiences we have in our external environment. So as we react to a situation in our external environment that produces an emotion, the resulting internal chemistry can signal our genes to either turn on (up-regulating, or producing an increased expression of the gene) or to turn off (down-regulating, or producing a decreased expression of the gene). The gene itself doesn’t physically change—the expression of the gene changes, and that expression is what matters most because that is what affects our health and our lives.

Culture can be loosely defined as the body of non-genetic information which people pass from generation to generation.

DNA is the messenger which illuminates that connection,handed down from generation to generation,carried,literally,in the bodies of my ancestors.

In the human body, each of approximately a trillion cells holds within its nucleus a complete and identical sequence of DNA. That is about 1.5 gigabytes of genetic information, and it would fill two CD-ROMs, yet the DNA sequence itself would fit on the point of a well-sharpened pencil.

An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl. Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy, based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly, they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.

Two revolutions coincided in the 1950s. Mathematicians, including Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, showed that all information could be encoded by binary digits, known as bits. This led to a digital revolution powered by circuits with on-off switches that processed information. Simultaneously, Watson and Crick discovered how instructions for building every cell in every form of life were encoded by the four-letter sequences of DNA. Thus was born an information age based on digital coding (0100110111001…) and genetic coding (ACTGGTAGATTACA…). The flow of history is accelerated when two rivers converge.

If, as the dowager had said, we are nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn’t our genetic purpose—to transmit DNA—be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating? Did it benefit the genes in any way for us to lead such intricately warped, even bizarre, lives?

Because the thing about viruses is that they're easily manipulated. The DNA they inject doesn't have to be destructive. It can be replaced with almost any kind of DNA you want, and it can be programmed to only replace certain parts of the host's genetic code. In other words, viruses are perfect vectors for genetic engineering.

if you were to identify a single person who embodies us Indians the best, who do you think it should be? Ideally, it should be a tribal woman because she is most likely to be carrying the deepest-rooted and widest-spread mtDNA lineage in India today, M2. In a genetic sense, she would represent all of our history, with very little left out. She shares the most with the largest number of Indians, no matter where in the social ladder they stand, what language they speak and which region they inhabit because we are all migrants, and we are all mixed.

Jonathan Sacks; “One way is just to think, for instance, of biodiversity. The extraordinary thing we now know, thanks to Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA and the decoding of the human and other genomes, is that all life, everything, all the three million species of life and plant life—all have the same source. We all come from a single source. Everything that lives has its genetic code written in the same alphabet. Unity creates diversity. So don’t think of one God, one truth, one way. Think of one God creating this extraordinary number of ways, the 6,800 languages that are actually spoken. Don’t think there’s only one language within which we can speak to God. The Bible is saying to us the whole time: Don’t think that God is as simple as you are. He’s in places you would never expect him to be. And you know, we lose a bit of that in English translation. When Moses at the burning bush says to God, “Who are you?” God says to him three words: “Hayah asher hayah.”Those words are mistranslated in English as “I am that which I am.” But in Hebrew, it means “I will be who or how or where I will be,” meaning, Don’t think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you. One of the ways God surprises us is by letting a Jew or a Christian discover the trace of God’s presence in a Buddhist monk or a Sikh tradition of hospitality or the graciousness of Hindu life. Don’t think we can confine God into our categories. God is bigger than religion.

Because of their sublime genes, the orphans were all incredible specimens and often referred to by their creator, Doctor Pedemont, and by Naylor, Kentbridge and the rest of their Omega masters, as post-humans. Their DNA was different to anyone else’s and by their teens they were superior in many ways to the rest of the population, being smarter, faster, stronger and more adaptable.

Have you ever had a weird and strong feeling that programming is a godlike kind of work? Just as the Lord created our world and the entire Universe based on molecular techniques such as DNA coding, software developers create a digital world based on IT coding.

The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even 'revolutionary' shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be 'refuted' by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus.

Aren’t all demigods related on the godly side, and doesn’t that make dating gross? But the thing is, the godly side of your family doesn’t count, genetically speaking, since gods don’t have DNA. A demigod would never think about dating someone who had the same godly parent. Like two kids from Athena cabin? No way. But a daughter of Aphrodite and a son of Hephaestus? They’re not related. So it’s no problem.

But “ancestry” is not a euphemism, nor is it synonymous with “race.” Instead, the term is born of an urgent need to come up with a precise language to discuss genetic differences among people at a time when scientific developments have finally provided the tools to detect them.

If, as the dowager had said, we are nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn’t our genetic purpose—to transmit DNA—be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating? Did it benefit the genes in any way for us to lead such intricately warped, even bizarre, lives?

The emerging and vital truth isn’t who is more Neanderthal than whom. It’s that all peoples, everywhere, enjoyed archaic human lovers whenever they could. These DNA memories are buried deeper inside us than even our ids, and they remind us that the grand saga of how humans spread across the globe will need some personal, private, all-too-human amendments and annotations—rendezvous here, elopements there, and the commingling of genes most everywhere.

Genetics is the major reason why people differ in personality, mental health and illness, and learning and cognitive abilities. In essence, the most important thing that parents give to their children is their genes. Your parents' systematic influence on who you are lies within the genes they gave you.

The loads we experience in today’s world differ hugely from the loads people experienced a hundred, a thousand, and ten thousand years ago. Yet we blithely accept that our health issues—which so many of us share—are genetic. Genetic, a term we’ve internally defined as beyond our control. Whether out of convenience or ignorance, we have failed to address the habitat in which our genes dwell, and the impact of the way we move on the state of our health.

The double-helix has solved all three of the major challenges of genetic physiology using ingenious variations on the same theme. Mirror-image chemicals are used to generate mirror-image chemicals, reflections used to reconstruct the orginal. Pairs used to maintain the fidelity and fixity of information. "Monet is but an eye," Cezanne once said of his friend, "but, God, what an eye." DNA, by the same logic, is but a chemical-but, God, what a chemical.

Most people think of viruses as parasites, but they aren't parasites at all. An organism has to be considered alive to be classified as a parasite. Viruses don't do any of things living organisms do. They don't grow, they can't move on their own, and they don't metabolize. They don't even have cells. But the one thing a virus is very good at is reproducing. When it finds a suitable host cell, it attaches itself and injects its DNA through the cell's plasma wall. The virus's genes are transcribed into the host cell's DNA, and the host cell's genetic code is rewritten. Whatever its job was before, its new job is to do nothing but produce copies of the original virus, usually until it's created so many that the cell bursts open and spreads the infection.

I placed some of the DNA on the ends of my fingers and rubbed them together. The stuff was sticky. It began to dissolve on my skin. 'It's melting -- like cotton candy.' 'Sure. That's the sugar in the DNA,' Smith said. 'Would it taste sweet?' 'No. DNA is an acid, and it's got salts in it. Actually, I've never tasted it.' Later, I got some dried calf DNA. I placed a bit of the fluff on my tongue. It melted into a gluey ooze that stuck to the roof of my mouth in a blob. The blob felt slippery on my tongue, and the taste of pure DNA appeared. It had a soft taste, unsweet, rather bland, with a touch of acid and a hint of salt. Perhaps like the earth's primordial sea. It faded away. Page 67, in Richard Preston's biographical essay on Craig Venter, "The Genome Warrior" (originally published in The New Yorker in 2000).

DNA testing poses questions that people in the adoptee community have thought about far longer than such testing has been around. Will my birth mother/father/half-sister be happy to know me? And more broadly, what is that person to me? What do we mean when we speak of 'family'? How much does genetics get to tell us about who we are?

Walking to the subway, Aomame kept thinking about the strangeness of the world. If, as the dowager had said, we are nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn’t our genetic purpose – to transmit DNA – be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating? Did it benefit the genes in any way for us to lead such intricately warped, even bizarre, lives?

The Galvin family’s DNA was part of that study. DeLisi seemed poised for a breakthrough. But within a few years, she, like Robert Freedman, learned the hard way about the vagaries of the marketplace. In 2000, Parke-Davis was bought by Pfizer. Almost right away, DeLisi learned that Pfizer was canceling DeLisi’s project. All work would stop immediately. And all the genetic material she had accumulated at Parke-Davis, including the Galvin family’s DNA, would remain the property of Pfizer—unavailable for DeLisi to use, unless

After comparing more than two thousand DNA samples, an American molecular geneticist, Dean Hamer, concluded that a person’s capacity to believe in God is linked to his brain chemicals. Of all things! Why not his urine? Perhaps it will not be amiss to observe that Dr. Hamer has made the same claim about homosexuality, and if he has refrained from arguing that a person’s capacity to believe in molecular genetics is linked to a brain chemical, it is, no doubt, owing to a prudent sense that once that door is open God knows how and when anyone will ever slam it shut again.

Consider the genesis of a single-celled embryo produced by the fertilization of an egg by a sperm. The genetic material of this embryo comes from two sources: paternal genes (from sperm) and maternal genes (from eggs). But the cellular material of the embryo comes exclusively from the egg; the sperm is no more than a glorified delivery vehicle for male DNA—a genome equipped with a hyperactive tail. Aside from proteins, ribosomes, nutrients, and membranes, the egg also supplies the embryo with specialized structures called mitochondria. These mitochondria are the energy-producing factories of the cell; they are so anatomically discrete and so specialized in their function that cell biologists call them “organelles”—i.e., mini-organs resident within cells. Mitochondria, recall, carry a small, independent genome that resides within the mitochondrion itself—not in the cell’s nucleus, where the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes (and the 21,000-odd human genes) can be found. The exclusively female origin of all the mitochondria in an embryo has an important consequence. All humans—male or female—must have inherited their mitochondria from their mothers, who inherited their mitochondria from their mothers, and so forth, in an unbroken line of female ancestry stretching indefinitely into the past. (A woman also carries the mitochondrial genomes of all her future descendants in her cells; ironically, if there is such a thing as a “homunculus,” then it is exclusively female in origin—technically, a “femunculus”?) Now imagine an ancient tribe of two hundred women, each of whom bears one child. If the child happens to be a daughter, the woman dutifully passes her mitochondria to the next generation, and, through her daughter’s daughter, to a third generation. But if she has only a son and no daughter, the woman’s mitochondrial lineage wanders into a genetic blind alley and becomes extinct (since sperm do not pass their mitochondria to the embryo, sons cannot pass their mitochondrial genomes to their children). Over the course of the tribe’s evolution, tens of thousands of such mitochondrial lineages will land on lineal dead ends by chance, and be snuffed out. And here is the crux: if the founding population of a species is small enough, and if enough time has passed, the number of surviving maternal lineages will keep shrinking, and shrinking further, until only a few are left. If half of the two hundred women in our tribe have sons, and only sons, then one hundred mitochondrial lineages will dash against the glass pane of male-only heredity and vanish in the next generation. Another half will dead-end into male children in the second generation, and so forth. By the end of several generations, all the descendants of the tribe, male or female, might track their mitochondrial ancestry to just a few women. For modern humans, that number has reached one: each of us can trace our mitochondrial lineage to a single human female who existed in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago. She is the common mother of our species. We do not know what she looked like, although her closest modern-day relatives are women of the San tribe from Botswana or Namibia. I find the idea of such a founding mother endlessly mesmerizing. In human genetics, she is known by a beautiful name—Mitochondrial Eve.

There has been relatively little change in human DNA in the last 10,000 years. But it is likely that we will be able to redesign it completely in the next thousand. Of course, many people will say that genetic engineering on humans should be banned. But I rather doubt that they will be able to prevent it. Genetic engineering on plants and animals will be allowed for economic reasons, and someone is bound to try it on humans.

At the time, the Wikipedia page read, “Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD; also known as complex trauma disorder) is a psychological disorder that can develop in response to prolonged, repeated experience of interpersonal trauma in a context in which the individual has little or no chance of escape.” And then, a paragraph down: “C-PTSD is a learned set of responses, and a failure to complete numerous important developmental tasks. It is environmentally, not genetically, caused. Unlike most of the diagnoses it is confused with, it is neither inborn nor characterological, not DNA based, it is a disorder caused by lack of nurture.

Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal. Scientists knew from studying HeLa that cancer cells could divide indefinitely, and they’d speculated for years about whether cancer was caused by an error in the mechanism that made cells die when they reached their Hayflick Limit. They also knew that there was a string of DNA at the end of each chromosome called a telomere, which shortened a tiny bit each time a cell divided, like time ticking off a clock. As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they’re almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer times our cells have left to divide before they die. By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely.

But for years questions persisted about whether most cannibalism was religiously motivated and selective or culinary and routine. DNA suggests routine. Every known ethnic group worldwide has one of two genetic signatures that help our bodies fight off certain diseases that cannibals catch, especially mad-cow-like diseases that come from eating each other’s brains. This defensive DNA almost certainly wouldn’t have become fixed worldwide if it hadn’t once been all too necessary.

In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g. DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within "racial" groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species.

Humans are actually reservoir hosts for countless bacteria and viruses that haven’t even been classified yet. About twenty percent of the genetic information in the nose doesn’t match any known or cataloged organism. In the gut, forty to fifty percent of all the DNA is from bacteria and viruses that have never been classified. Even in the blood, up to two percent is a sort of “biological dark matter.” In many ways, this biological dark matter, this sea of unknown viruses and bacteria, is the ultimate frontier.

All dogs are predators, but over thousands of generations, we’ve created sporting breeds to be exceptionally focused predators. All dogs like to dig and chase small prey, but terriers are superdriven to dig and find rodents. All dogs love to run, but greyhounds can run up to forty miles an hour, and huskies can run for hours and hours on end. All dogs have the natural ability to fight or wrestle with one another, but the bully breeds have been genetically engineered to fight to the death. The more pure the bloodline, the more that genetic “boost” will probably play a part in your dog’s behavior. That’s why some owners claim that their “mutts” make mellower pets, because, they theorize, their DNA has been somewhat diluted, and their breed-related drives diffused as a result.

Did you know that the fundamental building blocks of life are not cells, are not DNA are not even carbon but language yeah 'cause DNA is just a four-character language and binary code is a two-character language and what these languages are saying is the very act of revealing, so you reach an X-point when language attains a level of complexity where it begins to fold in upon itself trying to understand itself and this is sentience. Did you know that the entire Library of Congress can be encoded in our DNA because all you have to do is translate a binary system into a four-character system to where you can decode the genes like you're searching a microfiche and if you were to genetically engineer the corpus of human knowledge into our DNA then we'd be able to genetically pass the entire library along from generation to generation like frickin' disease, man.

You gently leaned over her to kiss her forehead and pulled the blankets around her shoulders. No father can adequately articulate the experience of watching his sleeping child—it must be lived. Now, imagine you are walking out of her room. Could you turn around and look at her and believe that the sum of her existence rests in a mass of cells? Certainly not. But this is exactly how a rank secularist is obliged to view his daughter. She is nothing more than a genetic product of his and her mother’s DNA. The puffing of air through her tiny chest keeps her alive. Your time with her is precious, meaningful, but purely a biological phenomenon. Her thoughts and feelings can be traced to neuronal firing in her brain. One day you will die and she will die and that will be that. Life began through the splitting and rejoining of DNA and when they stopped functioning, she did too.

The nuclear arms race is over, but the ethical problems raised by nonmilitary technology remain. The ethical problems arise from three "new ages" flooding over human society like tsunamis. First is the Information Age, already arrived and here to stay, driven by computers and digital memory. Second is the Biotechnology Age, due to arrive in full force early in the next century, driven by DNA sequencing and genetic engineering. Third is the Neurotechnology Age, likely to arrive later in the next century, driven by neural sensors and exposing the inner workings of human emotion and personality to manipulation.

[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival machines' for themselves — the bodies of living organisms including ourselves. As part of their equipment, bodies evolved onboard computers — brains. Brains evolved the capacity to communicate with other brains by means of language and cultural traditions. But the new milieu of cultural tradition opens up new possibilities for self-replicating entities. The new replicators are not DNA and they are not clay crystals. They are patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains — books, computers, and so on. But, given that brains, books and computers exist, these new replicators, which I called memes to distinguish them from genes, can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer.

Bruce has wrestled with his moods, and a psyche genetically prone to extremes, for most of his adult life. Decades of psychotherapy helped reveal and cast light on some of his most primal traumas and conflicts, but his raw moods, and occasional descents into full-blown depression, never quite went away. "You go through periods of being good, then something stimulates it," he says. "The clock, some memory. You never know. The mind wants to link all your feelings to a cause. I'm feeling that because I'm doing this, or because that happened." Eventually Bruce realized that his worst moods had nothing to do with what was actually taking place in his life. Awful, stressful things could happen - conflicts, stress, disappointments, death - and he'd be unflappable. Then things would be peaceful and easy and he'd find himself on his knees. "You're going along fine, and then boom, it hits you. Things that just come from way down in the well. Completely noncasual, but it's part of your DNA, part of the way your body cycles." Bruce knows his particular brain chemistry will never leave him completely in the clear. "You manage it, you learn and evolve, but another recognition you gotta have is that these are the cards you were dealt," he says. "These things are never going to be out of your life. You gotta be constantly vigilant and realistic about these things.

a result, the most efficient way for evolutionary forces to spread beneficial mutations has often been to invent mutations anew rather than to import them from other populations.44 The limited migration rates between some regions of Africa over the last few thousand years has resulted in what Ralph and Coop have described as a “tessellated” pattern of population structure in Africa. Tessellation is a mathematical term for a landscape of tiles—regions of genetic homogeneity demarcated by sharp boundaries—that is expected to form when the process of homogenization due to gene exchanges among neighbors competes with the process of generating new advantageous variations in each region.

The Lutz heck that emerges from his writings and actions drifted like a weather vane: charming when need be, cold-blooded when need be, tigerish or endearing, depending on his goal. Still, it is surprising that Heck the zoologist chose to ignore the accepted theory of hybrid vigor: that interbreeding strengthens a bloodline. He must have known that mongrels enjoy better immune systems and have more tricks up their genetic sleeves, while in a closely knit species, however "perfect," any illness that kills one animal threatens to wipe out all the others, which is why zoos keep careful studbooks of endangered animals such as cheetahs and forest bison and try to mate them advantageously. In any case, in the distant past, long before anyone was recognizably Aryan, our ancestors shared the world with other flavors of hominids, and interbreeding among neighbors often took place, producing hardier, nastier offspring who thrived. All present-day humans descend from that robust, talkative mix, specifically from a genetic bottleneck of only about one hundred individuals. A 2006 study of mitochondrial DNA tracks Ashkenazi Jews (about 92 percent of the world’s Jews in 1931) back to four women, who migrated from the Near East to Italy in the second and third centuries. All of humanity can be traced back to the gene pool of one person, some say to a man, some a woman. It’s hard to imagine our fate being as iffy as that, be we are natural wonders.

As a thought experiment, von Neumann's analysis was simplicity itself. He was saying that the genetic material of any self-reproducing system, whether natural or artificial, must function very much like a stored program in a computer: on the one hand, it had to serve as live, executable machine code, a kind of algorithm that could be carried out to guide the construction of the system's offspring; on the other hand, it had to serve as passive data, a description that could be duplicated and passed along to the offspring. As a scientific prediction, that same analysis was breathtaking: in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick finally determined the molecular structure of DNA, it would fulfill von Neumann's two requirements exactly. As a genetic program, DNA encodes the instructions for making all the enzymes and structural proteins that the cell needs in order to function. And as a repository of genetic data, the DNA double helix unwinds and makes a copy of itself every time the cell divides in two. Nature thus built the dual role of the genetic material into the structure of the DNA molecule itself.

The cure for HIV?” “In 2007, a man named Timothy Ray Brown, known later as the Berlin patient, was cured of HIV. Brown was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. His HIV-positive status complicated his treatment. During chemotherapy, he battled sepsis, and his physicians had to explore less traditional approaches. His hematologist, Dr. Gero Hutter, decided on a stem cell therapy: a full bone marrow transplant. Hutter actually passed over the matched bone marrow donor for a donor with a specific genetic mutation: CCR5-Delta 32. CCR5-Delta 32 makes cells immune to HIV.” “Incredible.” “Yes. At first, we thought the Delta 32 mutation must have arisen during the Black Death in Europe—about four to sixteen percent of Europeans have at least one copy. But we’ve traced it back further. We thought perhaps smallpox, but we’ve found Bronze Age DNA samples that carry it. The mutation’s origins are a mystery, but one thing is certain: the bone marrow transplant with CCR5-Delta 32 cured both Brown’s leukemia and HIV. After the transplant, he stopped taking his antiretrovirals and has never again tested positive for HIV.

Humans are actually reservoir hosts for countless bacteria and viruses that haven’t even been classified yet. About twenty percent of the genetic information in the nose doesn’t match any known or cataloged organism. In the gut, forty to fifty percent of all the DNA is from bacteria and viruses that have never been classified. Even in the blood, up to two percent is a sort of “biological dark matter.” In many ways, this biological dark matter, this sea of unknown viruses and bacteria, is the ultimate frontier. Almost all viruses are harmless until they jump to another host—a life form different from their natural hosts. The virus then combines with a completely new genome and causes a new and unexpected reaction—an illness. That was the ultimate danger with viruses,

The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We’re not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language. We might call it the Tree of Knowledge mutation. Why did it occur in Sapiens DNA rather than in that of Neanderthals? It was a matter of pure chance, as far as we can tell. But it’s more important to understand the consequences of the Tree of Knowledge mutation than its causes. What was so special about the new Sapiens language that it enabled us to conquer the world?* It was not the first language. Every animal has some kind of language.

Retroviruses are simply viruses that can insert DNA into a host’s genome, changing the host at a genetic level. They’re a sort of “computer software update.” When a person contracts a retrovirus, they are essentially receiving a DNA injection that changes the genome in some of their cells. Depending on the nature of the DNA inserted, getting a virus could be good, bad, or benign, and since every person’s genome is different, the result is almost always uncertain. Retroviruses exist for one purpose: to produce more of their own DNA. And they are good at it. In fact, viruses make up the majority of all the genetic material on the planet. If one added together all the DNA from humans, all other animals, and every single plant—every non-viral life form on the planet—that sum total of DNA would still be less than all the viral DNA on Earth.

A genetic fundamentalism permeates public awareness these days. It may be summed up as the belief that almost every illness and every human trait is dictated by heredity. Simplified media accounts, culled from semidigested research findings, have declared that inflexible laws of DNA rule the biological world. It was reported in 1996 that according to some psychologists, genes determine about 50 percent of a person’s inclination to experience happiness. Social ability and obesity are two more among the many human qualities now claimed to be genetic. True or not, narrow genetic explanations for ADD and every other condition of the mind do have their attractions. They are easy to grasp, socially conservative and psychologically soothing. They raise no uncomfortable questions about how a society and culture might erode the health of its members, or about how life in a family may have affected a person’s physiology or emotional makeup. As I have personally experienced, feelings of guilt are almost inevitable for the parents of a troubled child. They are all too frequently reinforced by the uninformed judgments of friends, neighbors, teachers or even total strangers on the bus or in the supermarket. Parental guilt, even if misplaced, is a wound for which the genetic hypothesis offers a balm

The world has been changing even faster as people, devices and information are increasingly connected to each other. Computational power is growing and quantum computing is quickly being realised. This will revolutionise artificial intelligence with exponentially faster speeds. It will advance encryption. Quantum computers will change everything, even human biology. There is already one technique to edit DNA precisely, called CRISPR. The basis of this genome-editing technology is a bacterial defence system. It can accurately target and edit stretches of genetic code. The best intention of genetic manipulation is that modifying genes would allow scientists to treat genetic causes of disease by correcting gene mutations. There are, however, less noble possibilities for manipulating DNA. How far we can go with genetic engineering will become an increasingly urgent question. We can’t see the possibilities of curing motor neurone diseases—like my ALS—without also glimpsing its dangers. Intelligence is characterised as the ability to adapt to change. Human intelligence is the result of generations of natural selection of those with the ability to adapt to changed circumstances. We must not fear change. We need to make it work to our advantage. We all have a role to play in making sure that we, and the next generation, have not just the opportunity but the determination to engage fully with the study of science at an early level, so that we can go on to fulfil our potential and create a better world for the whole human race. We need to take learning beyond a theoretical discussion of how AI should be and to make sure we plan for how it can be. We all have the potential to push the boundaries of what is accepted, or expected, and to think big. We stand on the threshold of a brave new world. It is an exciting, if precarious, place to be, and we are the pioneers. When we invented fire, we messed up repeatedly, then invented the fire extinguisher. With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and strong artificial intelligence, we should instead plan ahead and aim to get things right the first time, because it may be the only chance we will get. Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let’s make sure that wisdom wins.

Kauffman was in awe when he realized all this. Here it was again: order. Order for free. Order arising naturally from the laws of physics and chemistry. Order emerging spontaneously from molecular chaos and manifesting itself as a system that grows. The idea was indescribably beautiful. But was it life? Well no, Kauffman had to admit, not if you meant life as we know it today. An autocatalytic set would have had no DNA, no genetic code, no cell membrane. In fact, it would have had no real independent existence except as a haze of molecules floating around in some ancient pond. If an extraterrestrial Darwin had happened by at the time, he (or it) would have been hard put to notice anything unusual. Any given molecule participating in the autocatalytic set would have looked pretty much like any other molecule. The essence was not to be found in any individual piece of the set, but in the overall dynamics of the set: its collective behavior.

[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival machines' for themselves — the bodies of living organisms including ourselves. As part of their equipment, bodies evolved onboard computers — brains. Brains evolved the capacity to communicate with other brains by means of language and cultural traditions. But the new milieu of cultural tradition opens up new possibilities for self-replicating entities. The new replicators are not DNA and they are not 158 The Blind Watchmaker clay crystals. They are patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains — books, computers, and so on. But, given that brains, books and computers exist, these new replicators, which I called memes to distinguish them from genes, can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer.

Twin, family, and population studies have all conclusively shown that psychological traits are at least partly, and sometimes largely, heritable—that is, a sizable portion of the variation that we see in these traits across the population is attributable to genetic variation. However, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, the relationship between genes and traits is far from simple. The fact that a given trait is heritable seems to suggest that there must be genes for that trait. But phrasing it in that way is a serious conceptual trap. It implies that genes exist that are dedicated to that function—that there are genes for intelligence or sociability or visual perception. But this risks confusing the two meanings of the word gene: one, from the study of heredity, refers to genetic variants that affect a trait; the other, from molecular biology, refers to the stretches of DNA that encode proteins with various biochemical or cellular functions.

Another way is via genetic engineering. Here the germ is inserted into plasmid that has been manipulated by scientists. This type of plasmid is circular segments of DNA extracted from bacteria to serve as a vector. Scientists can add multiple genes and whatever genes they want into this plasmid. In case of vaccines, this includes a genetic piece of the vaccine germ and normally a gene for antibiotic resistance. This means that when the toxic gene is cultured inside the yeast, it has been designed with a new genetic code that makes it resistant to the antibiotic it’s coded for. The gene-plasmid combo is inserted into a yeast cell to be replicated. When the yeast replicates, the DNA from the plasmid is reproduced as a part of the yeast DNA. Once enough cells have been replicated, the genetic material in the new and improved yeast cell is extracted and put into the vaccine. Examples of this vaccine are the acellular pertussis and hepatitis B vaccines. One thing that doesn’t seem to concern scientists is the fact that the manmade genetic combination becomes the vaccine component. This mixture of intended and unintended genetic information may cause our immune system to overreact. This can be especially complicated for a child with compromised immune system. Another concern is that this new genetic code can become integrated with our own genetic material. Yeast, for instance, is very much like human DNA. It shares about one third of our proteins.

Normal cells could acquire these cancer-causing mutations through four mechanisms. The mutations could be caused by environmental insults, such as tobacco smoke, ultraviolet light, or X-rays—agents that attack DNA and change its chemical structure. Mutations could arise from spontaneous errors during cell division (every time DNA is replicated in a cell, there’s a minor chance that the copying process generates an error—an A switched to a T, G, or C, say). Mutant cancer genes could be inherited from parents, thereby causing hereditary cancer syndromes such as retinoblastoma and breast cancer that coursed through families. Or the genes could be carried into the cells via viruses, the professional gene carriers and gene swappers of the microbial world. In all four cases, the result converged on the same pathological process: the inappropriate activation or inactivation of genetic pathways that controlled growth, causing the malignant, dysregulated cellular division that was characteristic of cancer.

The Pyrenean ibex, an extinct form of wild mountain goat, was brought back to life in 2009 through cloning of dna taken from skin samples. This was followed in June of 2010 by researchers at Jeju National University in Korea cloning a bull that had been dead for two years. Cloning methods are also being studied for use in bringing back Tasmanian tigers, woolly mammoths, and other extinct creatures, and in the March/April 2010 edition of the respected Archaeology magazine, a feature article by Zah Zorich (“Should We Clone Neanderthals?”) called for the resurrection via cloning of what some consider to be man’s closest extinct relative, the Neanderthals. National Geographic confirmed this possibility in its May 2009 special report, “Recipe for a Resurrection,” quoting Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University, an authority on ancient dna who served as a scientific consultant for the movie Jurassic Park, saying: “I laughed when Steven Spielberg said that cloning extinct animals was inevitable. But I’m not laughing anymore.… This is going to happen.

The revolution caused by the sharing of experience and the spread of knowledge had begun. The Chinese, a thousand years ago, gave it further impetus by devising mechanical means of reproducing such marks in great numbers. In Europe, Johann Gutenberg independently, though much later, developed the technique of printing from movable type. Today, our libraries, the descendants of those mud tablets, can be regarded as immense communal brains, memorising far more than any one human brain could hold. More than that, they can be seen as extra-corporeal DNA, adjuncts to our genetic inheritance as important and influential in determining the way we behave as the chromosomes in our tissues are in determining the physical shape of our bodies. It was this accumulated wisdom that eventually enabled us to devise ways of escaping the dictates of the environment. Our knowledge of agricultural techniques and mechanical devices, of medicine and engineering, of mathematics and space travel, all depend on stored experience. Cut off from our libraries and all they represent and marooned on a desert island, any one of us would be quickly reduced to the life of a hunter-gatherer.

We have phosphate on our DNA. Aluminum attaches itself to it and messes up our genetic coding process. While the aluminum is inside a cell, some of its particles attach to adenosine triphosphate (ATP). The ATP is in charge of our cell’s energy production. So, in this manner the aluminum can affect our energy level. We have enzymes (proteins) within our cells that depend on attaching themselves to calcium (Ca) or magnesium (Mg) to function properly. Once our enzymes have attached to the Ca and Mg, they can carry on with their functions. Because the aluminum has such a strong positive charge, it’s able to break the bond between our enzymes and Ca or Mg. These enzymes are now no longer attached to Ca or Mg. They have become neutralized and are unable to carry out their responsibilities. We need these enzymes for efficient metabolism, but now the aluminum is attached to the enzymes instead. The protein molecules all look a little different because their shape reflects what they are designed to do. Aluminum disturbs their individual tasks and clumps them together so they are now misshapen and no longer functioning. Aluminum also messes with the cell surface, the membrane, the outer layer of the cell. With a dysfunctional cell membrane, everything inside the cell becomes compromised and it is no longer able to properly communicate with the environment surrounding the cell about what needs to be done[96].

Virtually all the authors of popular books on the subject assert that ADD is a heritable genetic disorder. With some notable exceptions, the genetic view also dominates much of the discussion within professional circles, a view I do not agree with. I believe that ADD can be better understood if we examine people’s lives, not only bits of DNA. Heredity does make an important contribution, but far less than usually assumed. At the same time, it would serve no purpose to set up the false opposition of environment to genetic inheritance. No such split exists in nature, or in the mind of any serious scientist. There are many biological events involving body and brain that are not directly programmed by heredity, and so to say that ADD is not primarily genetic is not in any sense to deny its biological features — either those that are inherited or those that are acquired as a result of experience. The genetic blueprints for the architecture and the workings of the human brain develop in a process of interaction with the environment. ADD does reflect biological malfunctions in certain brain centers, but many of its features — including the underlying biology itself — are also inextricably connected to a person’s physical and emotional experiences in the world. There is in ADD an inherited predisposition, but that’s very far from saying there is a genetic predetermination. A predetermination dictates that something will inevitably happen. A predisposition only makes it more likely that it may happen, depending on circumstances. The actual outcome is influenced by many other factors.

In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy. However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. Indeed, AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. If you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data is strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century – the attempt to concentrate all information in one place – might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first century.

In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy. “However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. Indeed, AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. If you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data is strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century – the attempt to concentrate all information in one place – might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first century.