Grandeur in this view of life

"…as more and more is learned about the complexities of these processes, the concept of 'the gene' as a reified DNA sequence tends to dissolve. What exists, as one molecular biologist put it, is not a set of discrete genes, but an entire genome. And what evolves is neither a set of genes nor a given static phenotype, but a developmental system, embedded as that system is in an even broader web of interactions with its fluctuating environment - the famous 'tangled bank' of hedgerow species that Darwin invokes in the closing paragraph of The Origin".

from Steven Roses’s review of Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb (23 July)