Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
presenting the two drafts of the human genome. They both led with discus-
sions of likely gene numbers and percentage similarities to the genomes of
non-human species (like thale cress). The front-page stories of almost every
Western broadsheet did the same. Earlier speculation that humans might
have over 100,000 genes gave way to the results of the HGP and Celera
research: there appeared to be no more than 30,000, only 30 per cent more
than a common worm and making us one-third genetically the same as
(for example) a daffodil. Given this 'surprisingly low' difference from 'sim-
ple' species (even lower from chimpanzees), much of the subsequent media
and scientific discussion centred on the
qualitative differences
between our
genes and those of other species: their functional complexity rather than
sheer quantity. At the same time, earlier scientific findings that all humans
were no more than 0.1 per cent genetically dissimilar were repeatedly high-
lighted. The overall message was that humanity is one genetically distinct
species, though our 'serial code' is distinguished less by its length than by
its 'programming power'.
Study Task:
Imagine the map of the human genome had revealed that
homo sapiens
had twice as many genes as our closest biological relatives. Why
do you think scientists would have wanted to highlight this discovery? As
a member of the lay public, why would this discovery have caught your
attention (if at all)? What would you have inferred about humans from this
discovery?
Why present information about human genetics in numerical terms? It
was no doubt intended to remove, or at least reduce, ambiguity. But, inten-
tionally or not, numbering genes links to other things too whose familiarity
to us normally shields them from scrutiny. First, it invites us to regard genes
as countable units of a similar size and shape (if not function) that together
comprise the genome, like bricks make a house when cemented in layers.
Second, it thereby implies that gene numbering is not merely an epistemo-
logical choice but, instead, an act of ontological necessity. In his classic work
The anthropology of numbers
, Thomas Crump (1990) pointed out that num-
bers are simply another way of describing (and intervening in) the world,
no less conventional than written or spoken language. This being the case,
we can ask: does mathematics comprise 'nature's own language' (as science
writer Ian Stewart has argued) or is it one way we've chosen to make what
we call nature speak to us? Crump is one of only a few analysts to con-
mathematicians, most practising scientists and most members of the gen-
eral public tend to assume that numbers are useful because they symbolise
things about the world that are real. They are not taken to be an 'imposi-
tion' on the world. But how secure is this assumption? It permits numbers to
quickly assume the status of 'facts' once they're used to characterise aspects
