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On 23/03/2020 21:20, <font size="4">John K Clark</font> wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:mailman.10.1584998400.21400.extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">
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<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span
style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">On Mon,
Mar 23, 2020 at 4:26 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <<a
href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org"
moz-do-not-send="true">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>>
wrote:</span><br>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px
0.8ex;border-left:1px solid
rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><span
class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span>“The
genome is not a blueprint"</blockquote>
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<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font
size="4">True, the genome is the recipe. And in the real
world nothing can follow instructions perfectly so 2
cooks will produce 2 cakes that are different even if
they're working from the same recipe. </font></div>
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<br>
It's not like that, either, really. It's more like an adaptive
recipe that can see what you're doing (and a bunch of other things,
like the time and the weather and the price of eggs) and changes in
response, in real-time. Oh, and it's a recipe without a name or
description, so you don't know what you're going to get until it's
finished.<br>
<br>
And of course, this is a bad analogy anyway, unless you regard the
cake as the entire organism, in which case it's just a fairly bad
analogy.<br>
<br>
When we say 'a gene for x' what it really means is a gene which has
been observed to have some connection to the characteristic x.
Mendel and his peas might have kick-started the science of genetics,
but in the bigger picture, an understanding of mendelian inheritance
can be more of a hindrance than a help.<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Ben Zaiboc</pre>
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