I was reading an issue of BusinessWeek some time ago and found an interesting article (“It’s All in the Genes? Ha!,” BusinessWeek, March 16, 1999, pp. 100-102). It’s about the theory that challenges the established genetics community which believes that the genes are the only agents that transfer the traits from the previous generation to the next. Basically, several biologist have confirmed the occurrence of a heredity transfer without the involvements of DNA, in this case, the shapes of proteins.
It’s such an idea that fascinates me and in some aspects makes me “happy”. I was somehow dissatisfied by the notion that what we are based on only depends on the sequences in these 46 chromosomes, just like a deterministic program would be. Of course, they can bring a complex variation, but still the thought of a single class of agents determining the whole system in the real world sounded too simple to be true.
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