"Our genes did not exist for us. We existed for them. We served only to carry these chemical codes forward through time, like those messengers in old sword-and-sandal war movies who run non-stop for days to deliver data and then drop dead."

"Your descendants have a new gene that helps secure the adaptive trait you originally developed through gene expression alone"


Mendel didn’t expose the physical gene, of course (that would come a century later), but the conceptual gene. And this conceptual gene, revealed in the tables and calculations of this math-friendly monk, seemed an agent of mathematical neatness. Mendel’s thousands of crossings showed that the traits he studied — smooth skin versus wrinkled, for instance, or purple flower versus white — appeared or disappeared in consistent ratios dictated by clear mathematical formulas. Inheritance appeared to work like algebra. Anything so math-friendly had to be driven by discrete integers.
 
It was beautiful work. Yet when Mendel first published his findings in 1866, just seven years after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, no one noticed. Starting in 1900, however, biologists rediscovering his work began to see that these units of heredity he’d discovered — dubbed genes in 1909 — filled a crucial gap in Darwin’s theory of evolution. This recognition was the Holy Shit! moment that launched genetics’ Holy Shit! century. It seemed to explain everything. And it saved Darwin."

(...)*

"In social honeybees, the differences between workers, guards, and scouts all arise from gene expression, not gene sequence. Individual bees morph from worker to guard to scout by gene expression alone, depending on the needs of the hive"

"What would Mendel think of that? Let’s play this out.

Mendel actually studied bees as a boy, and he studied them again for a couple years after he finished his pea-plant studies. In crossbreeding two species at the monastery, he accidentally created a strain of bees so vicious that he couldn’t work with them. If he’d had a microarray machine, he, like Gene Robinson, could have studied how much of the bees’ aggression rose from changes in the genetic code or how much rose from changes in gene expression. If he had, the father of genetics might have seen right then that traits change and species evolve not just when genes change, but when gene expression does. He might have discovered not just genes, but genetic accommodation. Not the selfish gene, but the social genome.

Alas, no such equipment existed, and Mendel worked in a monastery in the middle of town. His vicious bees promised not a research opportunity but trouble. So he killed them. He would found genetics not through a complex story of morphing bees, but through a simple tale of one pea wrinkled, one pea smooth."


*Source, with full text: aeon.co/magazine....