A Glimpse of Matt Ridley's Genome

Genome by Matt Ridley is a fascinating read explaining our twenty-three pairs of chromosome and their whats, hows, if sos and so whats. Each chapter offers an in depth look at how the human genome affects our history, fate, intelligence, self-interest, disease, stress, personality, sex, death, and so on, and so forth.  

But what I love most is Ridley's prose. He elegantly transforms complex, abstract concepts into  easy-to-understand metaphors. 

It's been years since I've read it, but Ridley's words left a powerful visual imprint on my mind. Today, I'll illustrate a few of my favorite passages: 

"Imagine that the genome is a book.

There are twenty-three chapters, called Chromosomes.

Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called Genes.

Each story is made up of paragraphs, called Exons,
which are interrupted by advertisements called Introns.

Each paragraph is made up of words, called Codons.

Each word is written in letters called Bases."

"In the beginning was the word.

The word
proselytised the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever.

The word
discovered how to rearrange chemicals

so as to capture little eddies in the stream of entropy and make them live.

"The word
transformed the land surface of the planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise.

The word
eventually blossomed and became sufficiently ingenious
to build a porridgy contraption called a human brain...

that could  discover and be aware of the word itself."

"My porridgy contraption boggles every time I think this thought. In four thousand million years of earth history, I am lucky enough to be alive today. In five million species, I was fortunate enough to be born a conscious human being. Among six thousand million people on the planet, I was privileged enough to be born in the country where the word was discovered.

In all of earth's history, biology and geography, I was born just five years after the moment when, and just two hundred miles from the the place where, two members of my own specifies discovered the structure of DNA...

and hence uncovered the greatest, simplest, most surprising secret in the universe."