What propels an embryo from one stage to the next-and makes one species different from another-is not a blueprint but rather an enormous autonomous l… - Gary F. Marcus

"In universities and pharmaceutical labs around the world, computer scientists and computational biologists are designing algorithms to sift through billions of gene sequences, looking for links between certain genetic markers and diseases. The goal is to help us sidestep the diseases we're most likely to contract and to provide each one of us with a cabinet of personalized medicines. Each one should include just the right dosage and the ideal mix of molecules for our bodies. Between these two branches of research, genetic and behavioral, we're being parsed, inside and out. Even the language of the two fields is similar. In a nod to geneticists, Dishman and his team are working to catalog what they call our "behavioral markers." The math is also about the same. Whether they're scrutinizing our strands of DNA or our nightly trips to the bathroom, statisticians are searching for norms, correlations, and anomalies. Dishman prefers his behavioral approach, in part because the market's less crowded. "There are a zillion people looking at biology," he says, "and too few looking at behavior." His gadgets also have an edge because they can provide basic alerts from day one. The technology indicating whether a person gets out of bed, for example, isn't much more complicated than the sensor that automatically opens a supermarket door. But that nugget of information is valuable. Once we start installing these sensors, and the electronics companies get their foot in the door, the experts can start refining the analysis from simple alerts to sophisticated predictions-perhaps preparing us for the onset of Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's."

The CD-ROM's worth of information in the genome really wouldn't be enough to paint a bitmapped picture of an embryo, but it is enough to describe a process for building one. An artist who only wants to paint a picture that looks like a kind of tree has much less to remember than an artist who wants to paint a particular Ponderosa Pine from memory; in a similar way, if some alien's genome had to encode every cell in a body, it would need much more information (many more nucleotides) than our genomes do, because ours specify a general way to build a creature rather than an exact picture of every detail of the finished product. Our genomes are lossy because they specify methods rather than pictures, but it is precisely that lossiness that allows them to so efficiently supervise the construction of complex biological structure.

It is no exaggeration to say that genes are essential to nearly every aspect of memory and the process of learning; without them, learning itself would not exist.