Steve Jones (biologist)

John Stephen Jones (born 24 March 1944) is a British geneticist and, from 1995 to 1999 as well as from 2008 to June 2010, Head of the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London.

Quotes

The Language of the Genes (1994)

London: Flamingo

• Biologists have an adolescent fascination with sex. Like teenagers they are embarrassed by the subject because of their ignorance.
  • Ch. 5, p. 96

• Sex must be important as it is so expensive.
  • Ch. 5, p. 96

• The meaning of sex is illustrated by two eponymous heroes of British history, King Edward VII (who flourished in the years before the First World War) and the King Edward variety of potato which has fed the British working class for almost as long). The potato, unlike the royal family, reproduces asexually. Every King Edward potato is identical to every other and each on has the same set of genes as the hoary ancestor of all potatoes bearing that name. This is convenient for the farmer and the grocer, which is why sex is not encouraged among potatoes.
  • Ch. 5, pp. 97–98

• Just why abstinence is a bad thing is not certain. In spite of the attractions of the mutation theory the frank answer is that, although the reason for the existence of women is obvious enough, nobody has any real idea what point there is in being a man. Men have however, made many attempts to justify their existence.
  • Ch. 5, p. 99

• Karl Marx, himself a denizen of one of the most congested of all London districts, was equally impressed by the dismal conditions of the new proletariat. he sent Darwin a copy of Das Kapital (which was found unread after his death).
  • Ch. 8, p. 156

Darwin's Ghost (2000)

New York: Random House

• Too often, the notion of progress is used as a code word for perfection, the chain of being in a different guise. The term should be employed with caution. Some see an arrow of time in biology, as in physics, but in the opposite direction — a relentless tendency to improve, just as the universe has a built-in trend toward chaos and disorder. That is too optimistic. Some lineages get more complicated, some simpler, and much of life has to struggle to stay in the same place. If everyone is evolving, nobody can afford to stop, and there may be constant change with no overall advance at all.
  • Ch. 10, p. 230

• Finland — a country that is a dilute solution of land in water.
  • Ch. 12, p. 261

Y: The Descent of Men (2003)

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

• Life managed without males for its first billion years, much of which was passed as single cells in a series of warm ponds. Then, in some ancient and neutral Eden, the fruit of the tree of sexual knowledge — a new mutation — persuaded members of a particular clone to fuse with cells from another, and then to divide. That ingenious idea is good news for the novel gene, as it doubles its rate of spread, but is a lot less so for those who receive it, who are obliged to copy the extra DNA. At once, two factions emerge, one keen to force itself upon the other. Thus was sex invented.
  Soon one contestant began to cheat. Large cells are expensive, but are better at dividing because they have more food reserves. Small cells are cheaper to make, but cannot afford to split. Their sole chance of success hence lies in fusion with a large cell. The first males had appeared on the scene.
  • Ch. 1, pp. 19–20

• Freud's antique notion of women as diminished men is quite wrong. Biology instead reveals every man's battle to escape the woman within.
  • Ch. 3, pp. 47–48

• Few chemicals confer maleness, but many take it away. Which, if any, are responsible for our own troubles is hard to say.
  The Pill changed men's lives in more ways than one. It caused re-productive hormones to leak into tap water and has been blamed both for the sex changes in freshwater fish and for the drop in our own sperm count. The jury is still out on the issue, but other hormones have had a disastrous effect. A drug called diethylstilbestrol was once thought-in error to prevent miscarriage. Five million mothers took it, and for a time it was even used as a chicken food supplement. A third of the boys exposed to the drug in the womb suffer from small testes or a reduced penis. In rats, the chemical causes prostate and testicular cancer (although there is as yet no sign of those problems in ourselves).
  To give a powerful steroid to pregnant women was at best unwise, but the effects of other compounds were harder to foresee. The 1950s saw a wonderful new chemical treatment for banana pests. Soon the novel insecticide was much used. Twenty years later the workers noticed something odd: they had almost no children. Their sperm count had dropped by five hundred times.
  • Envoi, p. 215

Attributed

• To the question of whether sharing 96 percent of our genetic make-up with chimps makes us 96 percent chimp; we also share about 50 percent of our DNA with bananas — that does not make us half bananas!
  • Reported without source in Joan Borysenko, The Plantplus Diet Solution: Personalized Nutrition for Life (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2014), p. 107

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Steve Jones (biologist) on Wikipedia