Genome

Willmor Pena
10/24/09
GENOME
The book “genome The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters” by Matt Ridley describes the epic history of the genome in the earth and how this genome has evolvedover the years until now.
A message that has great importance in the book is “THE GENES ARE NOT THERE TO CAUSE ILLNESS”. In my opinion Matt Ridley writes this in capital letters to make sure thereader understands that the genes exist for specific purposes besides making a body. In certain cases there are abnormal genes and those genes cause illness and defects on someone’s body.
A significantpurpose of the genome is to exile the genetic determinism; Ridley is an evolutionist who defends the basics of the genetics of our body and many of our traits of personality and behavior for example inchapter 10 he talks about stress and shows how the genes influence in the environment and how this at the same time influence in the genes forcing the activation of some genes and the deactivation ofothers. Ridley also says “you are not a brain running a body by switching on hormones. Nor are you a body running a genome by switching hormone receptors. Nor are you a genome running a brain byswitching on genes that switch on hormones. You are all of these at once”. He says this because he wants the reader to see the difference between heredity and environment because there is no clearseparation between them.
The genome resides in the heart of a cell and is the blueprint to make a live being. But the image that is shown by ridley, far from being of an element that serves to createinitially the organisms, the image is of a mutable being in continuous change full of genes that fight between them and try to take advantage of the organism’s resources, full of genes that activate ordeactivate themselves depending on the circumstances.
The chapter that interested me more was chapter 7 in which Ridley talks about chromosomes X and Y since these are the ones that spend more time in...