Anyway, I recommend to Dr. Le Fanu that he read The Agile Gene by Matt Ridley. It will answer many of his questions and more. That is, if he doesn’t know it all already.

All I want to do is touch on the very basics. If others would love to join me in this task, it would be greatly appreciated. We need to reach out to the community (being the global population) to help them be exposed to what genes are, and all of the other topics I mentioned in the above paragraph.

I suspect that Le Fanu is also befuddled by the difference between the similarities in gene counts between flies, worms, mice and humans and the differences in gene content. For example, we can clearly see that humans have many defective copies of olfactory receptors vs. the complements in species such as dogs and mice, which correlates with the far superior sense of smell in those organisms. Conversely, we can see (!) at a molecular level an explanation (in terms of different receptors) why we have trichromatic color vision while certain other mammals have essentially monochromatic vision. We can assign a lot of genes to the immune system, genes which are absent from invertebrates.

As long as the genome project has been gathering headlines & funding, there have been ‘genome reactionaries’ arguing against the importance of genes. Indeed, this camp feels that the money & time spent on genomic association studies is wasted. Le Fanu is voicing the reductio ad absurdum version of this, which says that genetics means nothing. He seems to be remembering many older studies which were poorly powered and apparently believes that the genetic association community has learned nothing from their past mistakes. In particular, the study sizes are getting enormous and candidate genes can immediately be identified. While some of these candidates are pure head-scratchers, more than a few have strong connections to relevant biology.

I don’t know about a letter to the editor, but I did send the chap an email inviting to comment in this forum.