JACOB'S LADDER: THE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN GENOME

"In 2001, an international team of scientists announced that they had substantially deciphered the human genome, which contains the genetic instructions for the creation and maintenance of a human being. But the mapping of the genome is just one moment in a long history that goes back not just to Darwin but all the way to Aristotle. Man's answer to the question of what brings form to the formless is an exhilarating and often bizarre history that encompasses - amongst many disciplines - genetics, the nature philosophy of Goethe, and preformation." "In this provocative and accessible account Henry Gee presents not just the history of ideas that led to the genome, but shows how the genome itself contains the scars and history of all the generations of life back to the very origins of life more than three billion years ago."--BOOK JACKET.