Gabriel Dover is Professor of Genetics at the University of Leicester. He is co-editor of Genome Evolution and the forthcoming Human Genome Evolution, and originator of the molecular drive theory of evolution.
Ignorance begat fear and fear begat religion. And it’s been downhill ever since; until the day in 1953 when the dark secrets of human nature became explicable more in terms of Crick and Watson’s Golden Helix than of Frazer’s Golden Bough. Or so they would have us believe, those high priests of the Human Genome Project, the bounty hunters of the Brave New World of genetic manipulation and the ‘selfish gene’. The dispiriting apogee to this curve of ‘hope’ took the form for me of a sad request from an aspiring Indian PhD student to seek the name(s) of god(s) in the sequences of DNA.
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