Thursday, August 5, 2010

Notes on Chapter 3: Genes Build Brains

Compressed Genomes

The description of how genes work, in particular that they do not code to all possible variations, only ones that fit a particular pattern, is appealing to me because it makes intuitive sense.  What is the point of coding to variations that are not viable?

Reasoning like this is dangerously close to asserting a "design" in the human genome instead of assuming that variation is random, something that I think of as a pitfall.  That being said, it does make a lot of sense and seems advantageous for an animal because it would take less energy to replicate the genome.  Furthermore, mutations are less liable to be catastrophic because most of the variation occurs in areas that do not have that effect on an organism.

Non-Genetic Variation

The idea that there is a limit to how much control genes have on brain makeup is also attractive because it seems to fit the evidence.  There are cases where a person could get Alzheimer's and their identical twin does not.  This sort of thing is hard to explain if all aspects of the brain are genetically controlled.

Furthermore, there is precedent for non-genetic control of different aspects of the organism.  For example, identical twins usually have different fingerprints because the patterns on fingers vary due to blood flow in the womb instead of being completely determined by genes.

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