genome the autobiography of a species in 23 chapters - matt ridley

[...]... North Africa, while the chimp's ancestor remained to the south Perhaps the sudden flooding, five million years ago, of the then-dry Mediterranean basin by a gigantic marine cataract at Gibraltar, a cataract one thousand times the volume of Niagara, suddenly isolated a small population of missing links on some large Mediterranean island, where they took to a life of wading in the water after fish and... N A , from the gene It is an RNA-containing machine, the ribosome, that translates that message, and it is a little R N A molecule that fetches and carries the amino acids for the translation of the gene's message But above all, R N A — unlike D N A — can act as a catalyst, breaking up and joining other molecules including R N A s themselves It can cut them up, join the ends together, make some of. .. size) was probably our ancestor, an ape At that point, ten million years before the present, there probably lived at least two species of ape in Africa, though there may have been more One was the ancestor of the gorilla, the other the common ancestor of the chimpanzee and the human being The gorilla's ancestor had probably taken to the montane forests of a string of central African volcanoes, cutting... desperate defence of his species against the theory of descent from the apes, the Victorian anatomist Sir Richard Owen once claimed that the hippocampus minor was a brain lobe unique to human brains, so it must be the seat of the soul and the proof of divine creation He could not find the hippocampus minor in the freshly pickled brains of gorillas brought back from the Congo by the adventurer Paul du Chaillu... faintly drawn on the filament of life Just as we now know that eggs came long before chickens (the reptilian ancestors of all birds laid eggs), so there is growing evidence that R N A came before proteins R N A is a chemical substance that links the two worlds of D N A and protein It is used mainly in the translation of the message from the alphabet of D N A to the alphabet of proteins But in the way... relatives The unity of life is an empirical fact Erasmus Darwin was outrageously close to the mark: 'One and the same kind of living filaments has been the cause of all organic life.' In this way simple truths can be read from the book that is the genome: the unity of all life, the primacy of R N A , the chemistry of the very earliest life on the planet, the fact that large, single-celled creatures were... G means alanine - in bats, in beetles, in beech trees, in bacteria They even mean the same in the misleadingly named archaebacteria living at boiling temperatures in sulphurous springs thousands of feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic ocean or in those microscopic capsules of deviousness called viruses Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug or blob you look at, if it is alive,... N A separates into its constituent strands at a higher temperature than do hybrids of chimp and gorilla D N A , or of gorilla and human D N A Calibrating the molecular clock to give an actual date in years is much more difficult Because apes are long-lived and breed at a comparatively advanced age, their molecular clocks tick rather slowly (the spelling mistakes are picked up mostly at the moment of. .. thrown away Unlike the massively competitive world of bacteria, we — that is all animals, plants and fungi - never came under such fierce competition to be quick and simple We put a premium instead on being complicated, in having as many genes as possible, rather than a streamlined machine for using them.11 The three-letter words of the genetic code are the same in every creature C G A means arginine and... idea is that information and entropy are opposite faces of the same coin and that both have an intimate link with energy The less entropy a system has, the more information it contains The reason a steam engine can harness the energy from burning coal and turn it into rotary motion is because the engine has high information content — information injected into it by its designer So does a human body Aristotie's . before the existence of animals; and many families of these animals long before other families of them, shall we conjec- ture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause. opposite all the Gs and Gs opposite all the Cs. In fact, the usual state of DNA is the famous DOUBLE HELIX of the original strand and its complementary pair intertwined. To make a copy of the. book is a piece of digital information, PREFACE 7 written in linear, one-dimensional and one-directional form and defined by a code that transliterates a small alphabet of signs into a large