Experimental Blog #136

Quotations from and comments about "How We Live and Why We Die" - The Secret Lives of Cells by Lewis Wolpert

"...there are more molecules of water in a glass of water than glasses of water in all the oceans."
"Proteins, of which there are around 100,000 different types in our body, are strings of ... amino acids. ... "Most of our cells contain several thousand different proteins..."
"The 200 or so different types of cells in our body - skin cells, nerve cells, liver cells, fat cells and many others - all have their function determined by the proteins they contain ..."
"Genes control developement of every bit of our bodies by determining which proteins are present in our cells ... "
"The key to understanding living systems is proteins, and genes merely provide the information for making proteins."

Can this really be true?!! "..there are a thousand million synapses in a tiny piece of our brain the size of a grain of sand - and think how many grains of sand there are in our brains."

"Genetics, it is asserted, is not destiny. ... as it is all too easy to be misled as to what genes actually do for us, nor is it easy to accept that much of our destiny is due to our genetic inheritance." "Why is there so much resistance to accepting that genes can play such an important role in our behavior?"
The author, Lewis Wolpert, goes on to write about men and women, criminality, homosexuality, and mathematical, language, and spatial skills, besides very many other things. He never, or rarely, uses the word ancestry; such as, perhaps, "ancestry is destiny." At least, as far as we can know.