The genome is as complicated and indeterminate as ordinary life, because it is ordinary life. This should come as a relief. Simple determinism, whether of the genetics or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for...

In history, and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster...

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 EXTONS, which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS.Each paragraph...

TP53 seems to encode the greater good, like a suicide pill in the mouth of a soldier that dissolves only when it detects evidence that he is about to mutiny.

…because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralised process…no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can...

The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene

Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed...

How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the...

The gene contains a single ‘word’, repeated over and over again: CAG, CAG, CAG, CAG … The repetition continues sometimes just six times, sometimes thirty, sometimes more than a hundred times. Your destiny, your sanity...

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person’s job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or...

Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.

Snaží-li se muž získat ženu, nepošle ji svůj výpis z účtu, ale daruje jí perlový náhrdelník. Nechlubí se svou lékařskou kartou, ale mezi řečí prohodí, že každý týden uběhne patnáct kilometrů a nikdy nebývá nachlazený....

There is a neat economic explanation for the sexual division of labour in hunter-gatherers. In terms of nutrition, women generally collect dependable, staple carbohydrates whereas men fetch precious protein. Combine the two – predictable calories...

We consciously decide whether to consider people; we fall in love despite ourselves; we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business.

At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.