"I talk a lot about genes, so let's just step way back and give a useful definition of a gene. I admit right up front, though, that there are two limitations: I'm going to give a very simplified explanation that fits with a molecular genetics focus (pure geneticists define genes very differently), and I'm going to talk only about eukaryotic/metazoan genes. I tell you right now that if I asked a half dozen different biologists to help me out with this, they'd rip into it and add a thousand qualifiers, and it would never get done. So let's plunge in and see what a simple version of a gene is."
More like this
John Hawks has an interesting post on what it means to be human in which he argues that our "human-ness" (humanity?) is our shared evolutionary history. I like it. But Hawks also writes the following:
Targeted discovery of novel human exons by comparative genomics:
There was a time not that long ago when sequencing a single gene would be hailed as a scientific milestone.