The Early Days of a Better Nation  Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Junkyard genes  I've already cited Richard Dawkins' review of
Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True, and now I'm going to do it
again, because it has (ha!) a genomics connection: The molecular
genetics revolution, which began in 1953, would have taken
Darwin’s breath away and filled him with exultation. Every
living creature carries within each of its cells a voluminous
textual recipe for making itself. Nowadays, we can read these
messages, accurately and with a completeness that is limited
only by (rapidly shrinking) costs and time. Because the DNA
texts of all animals and plants use the identical four-letter
code, we have a gold mine of opportunity for comparison. In his
own time, Darwin could compare, say, the wing of a bat, the
flipper of a whale and the spade of a mole, and spot the
relationships among a handful of bones. Today – and more cheaply
in the near tomorrows – we can do it on an altogether grander
scale, lining up billion-letter DNA t