Darwin In the Genome by Lynn Helena Caporale, McGraw-Hill, $24.95, ISBN 0071378227 Reviewed by John Bonner
IN THE lottery of life, only the holders of the winning tickets will pass on their genes to the next generation. So it makes sense, as biologist Miroslav Radman pointed out, to buy as many tickets as you can, with as many combinations of numbers as possible. Variety is the key to success.
Yet it has always been assumed that an organism had no direct control over the process of generating diversity – it was the product of random mistakes in copying DNA in…
