The Gene: An Intimate History

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

A theory of heredity, Darwin realized, was not peripheral to a theory of evolution; it was of pivotal importance. For a variant of gross-beaked finch to appear on a Galápagos island by natural selection, two seemingly contradictory facts had to be simultaneously true. First, a short-beaked “normal” finch must be able to occasionally produce a gross-beaked variant—a monster or freak (Darwin called these sports—an evocative word, suggesting the infinite caprice of the natural world. The crucial driver of evolution, Darwin understood, was not nature’s sense of purpose, but her sense of humor). And second, once born, that gross-beaked finch must be able to transmit the same trait to its offspring, thereby fixing the variation for generations to come. If either factor failed—if reproduction failed to produce variants or if heredity failed to transmit the variations—then nature would be mired in a ditch, the cogwheels of evolution jammed. For Darwin’s theory to work, heredity had to possess constancy and in-constancy, stability and mutation.