"Ten generations back, for example, the number of ancestral [genome] stretches of DNA is around 757 but the number of ancestors is 1,024 guaranteeing that each person has several hundred ancestors from whom he or she has received no DNA whatsoever." (David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here, p.11, Vintage, 2018)
Intended
for the Advancement of
Public Understanding of the Biological Sciences
What is Life presents conceptual
thinking in biology. While many current issues in biology
are based on simple ideas, the elucidation of biological
mechanisms that explain diverse aspects of life is challenging
because cells and organisms are complex systems. To understand how biologists study the structure and function of living
organisms one has to understand the relationship between
experiment and theory. Such an understanding amounts to
scientific literacy.
