The Number of Different Genes

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i. believe there are some note books of beethoven which show a development when beethoven jotted down phrases, whetwe used to go out for long walks,. And he had a note book, and he jot down phrases. I'venoi'v not actually seen the notebookk itself, but i believe that's the case. Ok, very good. To get it back to jean's a a little bit i've wondered for a long time, and now that i have you here, there's a perfect time to ask these tions about the just numerical relationships between the number of different genes we could have and thenumber of different traits we could have.

Evolution has equipped species with a variety of ways to travel through the air — flapping, gliding, floating, not to mention jumping really high. But it hasn’t invented jet engines. What are the different ways that heavier-than-air objects might be made to fly, and why does natural selection produce some of them but not others? Richard Dawkins has a new book on the subject, Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution. We take the opportunity to talk about other central issues in evolution: levels of selection, the extended phenotype, the role of adaptation, and how genes relate to organisms.

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Richard Dawkins received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Oxford. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, where he was previously the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. He is an internationally best-selling author, whose books include The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature.

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