Genes and science
Is science catching up with religion (“Gene genie”, January 8)? About 65 years ago, my identical twin brother and I found it hard to accept Auntie Joan’s Sunday School teaching that “God has a plan for you”. After discussing the doctrine of predestination over the dishes with Dad, we decided we would freely choose our own paths.
Some years later, John and I began to assert our individuality by taking different directions. John chose theatre and I chose design. While practising as a designer, I turned the visual/spatial experience of design into words on paper as text for magazine articles. While practising as an actor, John put words on paper as scripts to be turned into visual/spatial experiences on stage or screen.
Eventually, through very different circumstances, we each wrote a book about the history of our chosen profession. Both Downstage Upfront and New Zealand by Design turned out to be exactly 512 pages long. Maybe Auntie Joan was right, our destiny was in our genes!
However, John had both his hips replaced many years before I had my one. It seems our lived experience is as inconclusive as the science.
Michael Smythe
(Auckland)
Since James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s unrelenting promotion, in the 1950s and 60s, of the idea that genes gave us the explanation of life forms, the science world has struggled with a
