Scientists are not interested in facts. What they like is ignorance. They mine it, eat it, attack it – choose the metaphor you prefer – and in the process they keep discovering more ignorance. Every answer leads to a set of new questions. The past few years have seen a once-in-an-aeon explosion of new knowledge about the human body and mind, as a consequence of our becoming the first creature in four billion years to read our own genetic recipe. Even more, they have seen an explosion of newly discovered ignorance.
Most people now know the humiliating news from the Human Genome Project that we have the same number of genes as a mouse. There is no special set of 50,000 genes for making human brains, as was being seriously mooted just a decade ago. The news keeps getting more deflating, because even the recent estimate of 30,000 human genes looks like an overestimate.
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