At the international BioVision conference in Lyon in February 2001, the geneticist Craig Venter performed a remarkable piece of scientific barnstorming. Human beings possess far fewer genes than science had ever realised, he announced. We have about 30,000, far lower than previous estimates of 100,000.
Such lack of heritable material showed people are not prisoners of their genes but are shaped primarily by environmental influences, he added. “We simply do not have enough genes for this idea of biological determinism to be right,” said Venter, who has died aged 79. “The wonderful diversity of the human species is not hard-wired in our genetic code. Our environments are critical.”
