If there is not preformation, and no blueprint, there is also no getting away from the environment. Genes do not guarantee particular products; rathe… - Gary F. Marcus

Biology doesn't know in advance what the end product will be; there's no Stuffit Compressor to convert a human being into a genome. But the genome itself is very much akin to a compression scheme, a terrifically efficient description of how to build something of great complexity-perhaps more efficient than anything yet developed in the labs of computer scientists (never mind the complexities of the brain, there are trillions of cells in the rest of the body, and they are all supervised by the same 30,000-gene genome). And although there is no counterpart in nature to a program that compresses a picture into a compact description, there is a natural counterpart to the program that decompresses the compressed encoding, and that's the cell. Genome in, organism out. Through the logic of gene expression, cells are self-regulating factories that translate genomes into biological structure.

One key lesson learned from mapping the genome is that access to a rough initial map proved crucial to developing more detailed maps of small individual human differences.

Dino-DNA injected into frog eggs would likely yield something different from dino-DNA in dinosaur eggs-because the micro-environment of the egg would inevitably influence which genetic cascades were expressed. (Fans of the environment shouldn't get too comfortable, either-implanting a frog's DNA into a dinosaur egg would be even less likely to yield a dinosaur.) Because the recipes that build the mind and brain are always sensitive to the environment, there is no guarantee that those recipes will converge on any particular outcome, and there will never be an easy answer to our questions about nature and nurture.