- Davidson's work demolishes one pillar of this notion, the idea that we have a gene for this or that, in some one-to-one correspondence. It's much more like music. Yes, Mozart and Beethoven used the same notes, but how they arranged them is what matters. Similarly, if genes are turned on at different times, or in the context of different sets of genes, the results can be dramatically different. Humans and chimpanzees, for example, share more than 98 percent of their DNA. The real difference between the species probably lies not in the 2 percent that diverges, but in how the 98 percent that is the same gets orchestrated. As Davidson told me, it's not what the genes are, but "how the genes are used."
So, too, with science itself: How societies use–or misuse–science is what matters. Here in the U.S., biology is becoming synonymous with pharmacology. That's largely because the pharmaceutical industry–the most profitable industry in America–funds more and more research, and lobbies the government to direct more of its vast research budget to test-tube science that will make it easier to find new drugs, not toward social science that will never lead to a product. Of course, molecular biology has provided near miraculous treatments for ailments as diverse as depression and AIDS. But the idea that biology is only about cells and test tubes obscures the rest of human experience, such as culture and politics. The word biology, after all, comes from the ancient words for life and logic. It is the logic of life.