Echos – Issue 68: Context

Before Corrine’s husband abandoned her in Berlin, he liked to say that her name reminded him of the word “corrupt.” But ending in a twist rather than a split. Her last name was the French word for “swimsuit” but he never mentioned that. This seemed strange now that he was gone, as many of his behaviors did. Kind of like how the best view of a city is when you’re leaving it.

They were in Germany on his business, which was diplomatic in nature and disclosure. It was not unusual for him to spend several days away at a time without telling her where he was going or why. When they’d first started seeing each other this seemed sexy; Corinne could imagine him tangled in some web of greater intrigue. Seven years in though it mostly involved making small talk with her fellow wives at black-tie dinners, where it seemed the less you knew about your spouse’s work the more important it must be. Corinne very rarely knew the least. His insistent mysteriousness had begun to grow stale.

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Still, she’d been excited when he told her about his newest posting. Corinne had been nine years old when the…

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It’s the End of the Gene As We Know It – Issue 68: Context

We’ve all seen the stark headlines: “Being Rich and Successful Is in Your DNA” (Guardian, July 12); “A New Genetic Test Could Help Determine Children’s Success” (Newsweek, July 10); “Our Fortunetelling Genes” make us (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 16); and so on.

The problem is, many of these headlines are not discussing real genes at all, but a crude statistical model of them, involving dozens of unlikely assumptions. Now, slowly but surely, that whole conceptual model of the gene is being challenged.

We have reached peak gene, and passed it.

It is, of course, an impressive story. Today, most people know about Gregor Mendel’s breeding experiments with pea plants in the 1850s. He concentrated on simple traits with well-defined, easy to count variations: purple or white flowers; long or short stems; smooth or wrinkled seeds; and so on. After cross-fertilization the patterns of variation in offspring suggested correlations with variation in single “heredity units.”

Mendel’s inherited factors-hitherto imputed, but unidentified-are what came to be called the genes. In the early 1900s, it was tempting to equate them with the information and instructions for the comprehensive development of the whole offspring, mental and physical.

In a famous paper in 1911, Wilhelm…

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