Ray

“Your genome is the totality of your DNA, 3 billion letters of it, and due to the way it comes together – by the mysterious (from a biological point of view) business of sex – it is unique to you. Not only is this genetic fingerprint yours alone, it’s unlike any other of the 107 billion people who have ever lived. That applies even if you are an identical twin, whose genomes begin their existence indistinguishable, but inch away from each other moments after conception. In the”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“A gene encodes a phenotype – that is, the physical manifestation of a piece of DNA – and differences in those physical manifestations in a population are visible to nature as a means of selecting what works better. The gene that encodes that phenotype is what is transmitted from generation to generation, the unit of inheritance. A gene for processing goat’s milk after weaning was selected in humans over a gene that did not permit digestion of a nutritious drink. Individuals are merely carriers of genes, which drive the necessity of procreating simply so that the existence of the gene is perpetuated.”
― Adam Rutherford, The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War and the Evolution of Us

“Despite our differences, all humans are remarkably close relatives, and our family tree is pollarded, and tortuous, and not in the slightest bit like a tree. But we are the fruit thereof.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes