Linking gene expression to artistic movements, Enrico Coen’s Cells to Civilizations argues that these processes follow a common set of rules
ORGANISMS grow, populations evolve, individuals learn and societies change: four levels of biological transformations, each following its own distinctive mechanisms. In Cells to Civilizations, Enrico Coen puts forward the thesis that these disparate processes follow a common set of rules.
Coen, a plant molecular geneticist, helped discover the genes that direct the shape of a flower. He sifted through thousands of snapdragon plants to find transposons – short DNA sequences that can splice copies of themselves elsewhere in the…
