Matt Ridley - Genome - The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

The autobiography of a species in 23 chapters

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2004

First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Fourth Estate Limited

Copyright © Matt Ridley 1999

Matt Ridley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The author is grateful to the following publishers for permission to reprint brief extracts: Harvard University Press for four extracts from Nancy Wexler’s article in The code of codes , edited by D. Kevles and R. Hood (pp. 62 – 9); Aurum Press for an extract from The gene hunters by William Cookson (p. 78); Macmillan Press for extracts from Philosophical essays by A. J. Ayer (p. 338) and What remains to be discovered by J. Maddox (p. 194); W. H. Freeman for extracts from Narrow roads of gene land by W. D. Hamilton (p. 131); Oxford University Press for extracts from The selfish gene by Richard Dawkins (p. 122) and Fatal protein by Rosalind Ridley and Harry Baker (p. 285); Weidenfeld and Nicolson for an extract from One renegade cell by Robert Weinberg (p. 237). The author has made every effort to obtain permission for all other extracts from published work reprinted in this book.

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Source ISBN: 9781857028355

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 9780007381845

Version: 2017-04-07

‘This is a spectacular book.’ Spectator

‘This is as absorbing a read as any science-fiction novel but it is dealing with the horizon of real knowledge. Barely a page passes without a new morsel of knowledge brought with almost breathless enthusiasm from academic journals by Matt Ridley.’ Sunday Herald

‘Ridley is a raconteur, skilled at telling vivid stories of discoveries and amassing facts.’ New Scientist

‘ Genome offers one of the most perceptive and lively accounts of what we are learning – and might find out in the future – about the book of man.’ Prospect

‘A lucid and exhilarating romp through our human chromosomes that lets us see how nature and nurture combine to make us human.’ James Watson, author of The Double Helix

‘ Genome , like the best of popular science, is both an exciting scientific exploration and a sheer pleasure to read.’ Yorkshire Post

‘Readers will find this book difficult to put down.’ New Humanist

Books of the Year 1999

‘Matt Ridley’s Genome lives up to the high standard of The Red Queen and The Origins of Virtue. This makes it very good indeed, for Ridley is a leader among today’s highly successful scientist authors. Intelligence, Disease, Immortality, Eugenics…23 topics of particular human interest are tied to our 23 chromosomes. The 23 chapters brim with Ridley’s customary stylish wit and cool insouciance. The book appears appropriately in the closing year of Watson and Crick’s century, which is about to culminate in the finished Human Genome Project.’ Richard Dawkins, Guardian

‘Matt Ridley’s Genome is as elegant, as unpatronising and lucid as a layman could desire. Blessed are the users of plain language, for they shall be read.’ Miranda Seymour, Independent

‘ Genome makes accessible a subject that is far too important to be left to the boffins and the doctors. It’s elegant, lucid, formidably well informed and, above all, human.’ Jane Ridley, Spectator

For my parents and my children

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Preface

Chromosome 1 - Life

Chromosome 2 - Species

Chromosome 3 - History

Chromosome 4 - Fate

Chromosome 5 - Environment

Chromosome 6 - Intelligence

Chromosome 7 - Instinct

Chromosome 8 - Conflict

Chromosome 9 - Self-Interest

Chromosome 10 - Disease

Chromosome 11 - Stress

Chromosome 12 - Personality

Chromosome 13 - Self-Assembly

Chromosome 14 - Pre-History

Chromosome 15 - Immortality

Chromosome 16 - Sex

Chromosome 17 - Memory

Chromosome 18 - Death

Chromosome 19 - Cures

Chromosome 20 - Prevention

Chromosome 21 - Politics

Chromosome 22 - Eugenics

Chromosome 23 - Free Will

Bibliography and Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also By

About the Publisher

The human genome – the complete set of human genes – comes packaged in twenty-three separate pairs of chromosomes. Of these, twenty-two pairs are numbered in approximate order of size, from the largest (number 1) to the smallest (number 22), while the remaining pair consists of the sex chromosomes: two large X chromosomes in women, one X and one small Y in men. In size, the X comes between chromosomes 7 and 8, whereas the Y is the smallest.

The number 23 is of no significance. Many species, including our closest relatives among the apes, have more chromosomes, and many have fewer. Nor do genes of similar function and type necessarily cluster on the same chromosome. So a few years ago, leaning over a lap-top computer talking to David Haig, an evolutionary biologist, I was slightly startled to hear him say that chromosome 19 was his favourite chromosome. It has all sorts of mischievous genes on it, he explained. I had never thought of chromosomes as having personalities before. They are, after all, merely arbitrary collections of genes. But Haig’s chance remark planted an idea in my head and I could not get it out. Why not try to tell the unfolding story of the human genome, now being discovered in detail for the first time, chromosome by chromosome, by picking a gene from each chromosome to fit the story as it is told? Primo Levi did something similar with the periodic table of the elements in his autobiographical short stories. He related each chapter of his life to an element, one that he had had some contact with during the period he was describing.

I began to think about the human genome as a sort of autobiography in its own right – a record, written in ‘genetish’, of all the vicissitudes and inventions that had characterised the history of our species and its ancestors since the very dawn of life. There are genes that have not changed much since the very first single-celled creatures populated the primeval ooze. There are genes that were developed when our ancestors were worm-like. There are genes that must have first appeared when our ancestors were fish. There are genes that exist in their present form only because of recent epidemics of disease. And there are genes that can be used to write the history of human migrations in the last few thousand years. From four billion years ago to just a few hundred years ago, the genome has been a sort of autobiography for our species, recording the important events as they occurred.