A vocabulary of the Shanghai dialect

This book is about what genetics can — and cannot — tell us about ourselves. Its title, The Language of the Genes, points to the analogy upon which it turns, rhe parallels between biological evolution and the history of language. Inheritance is a discourse through time, a set of instructions passed from generation to generation. It has a vocabulary — the genes themselves — a grammar, the way in which the information is arranged, and a literature, the thousands of instructions needed to make a human being. It is based on the DNA molecule, the famous double helix, the icon of the twentieth century. Johann Miescher, the Swiss discoverer of that marvellous substance, himself wrote in 1892. that its message might be transmitted 'just as the words and concepts of all tongues can find expression in twenty-four to thirty letters of the alphabet.' A century of science shows how right he was. Both languages and genes evolve. Each generation makes errors in transmission and, sooner or later, enough differences accumulate to produce a new dialect — or a new form of life ...»