More importantly, genes may well be like this. Biologists habitually talk of ‘the function of a gene’ – what it does. The unspoken assumption is that it does only one thing, or a small list of things. This is pure magic: the gene as a spell. It is conceived as being a spell in the same sense that ‘Cold Start’ in a car is. But a lot of genes may not do anything that can be summed up in a simple story.
