‘The Selfish Gene’ and ‘Y: The Descent of Men’

[brokenhut]

I’ve just finished making my way through a pair of popular science biology books: Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and Steve Jones’ Y: The Descent of Men, both of which were pretty good.

Comments

i meant to ask you if this came up in your book at all...

[h2_the_foodie]

something i recently came across (in a conversation with developmental biologist lovely Ruth) was (and I can't remember the actual name of the concept, naturally) the need for men in the world, sexually. (When i first typed that i missed the N off men, hehe).

Which is to say that, even with modern cloning and IVF and genetic techniques, it is not possible to make a baby girl foetus/embryo from two women. On paper it might seem fine, women have XX sex chromosomes, so one each gives an X and bingo! baby girl. But it doesn't work. one of those X chromosomes has to come from a man. Even though he got it from his mammie.

I thought that was bloody cool when Ruth told me.

Re: i meant to ask you if this came up in your book at all...

[h2_the_foodie]

Genetic imprinting, was the phrase i was looking for, I believe.

Re: i meant to ask you if this came up in your book at all...

[brokenhut]

I looked it up on wiki and it seems to be related to our old friend, Prader-Willi syndrome! Real interesting stuff anyway.

[not_a_mouse]

haven't read the Jones book, may go buy it now- it sounds v. interesting. As to 'The Selfish Gene', I found it highly informative, we had to read it as part of our Psychology course when investigating genetic traits etc.

I found it well written and interesting (much more than most of our assigned texts). Though I'm not sure it said (as you yourself point out) exactly what our lecturer meant it to say...

All this stuff I find immensely interesting, and I sometimes wonder whether there is a closet biologist lurking around inside me.

[brokenhut]

Yeah, I think there's a closet biologist inside all of us. Maybe just a small one, but they're in there I'm sure.

[h2_the_foodie]

You know, I think it's the closet biologist that makes people thing that biology is easy. Usually when you hear people talking about their degrees, it seems a bit daunting and difficult and dull. But if said degree seems interesting, like, say, biology, then people think they'd be interested to study it, and thus by bringing the subject into their personal realm of possible study, making it seem feasible, and thus easy.

It's a thought, anyway. I think the same can be said for all those 'easy' arts degrees out there. Whereas physics/CS/maths must be hard because most of us don't get the cool stuff.

[brokenhut]

It's weird though, cos no one ever thinks that medicine is easy. But it could be fairly easily argued, I think, that medicine is applied biology; like physics is maths in the real world!

I think another reason is that there's almost always something to get your head around - some analogy or mental image, no matter how loose. Try doing that with quantum physics and see how far you get!

I suppose that also comes back to your argument, cos the cool stuff is within the mental grasp of the layman, even if it has to be simplified a bit. I'm trying to reduce the technical nature of my CS posts at the moment to see if I can get something I'm happier with. I know what I want - I want to think that someone with no computer science knowledge could read a post of mine and think "that's cool, that's useful". And maybe next time they see something completely unrelated to what I was talking about think "I wonder if this can be solved with X too?".

Whether I will ever reach that point is another matter, but I hope to keep trying. Look out in the