Scientists have been studying genes for a long time. There have been many discoveries since they began studying them, and we now have a much better idea of their structure and functions. The article Scientists and Philosophers Find That ‘Gene’ Has a Multitude of Meanings, by Natalie Angier, illustrates that the word gene, and other genetic vocabulary, is often misleading. Angler makes some good points in this article, but her article is misleading, and I don’t know understand all of it because the writing was wordy and complicated.
As scientists have learned about genes and started looking into the details more, gene research has become more complicated. In Angler’s article it says that “genes” only account for a very small part of the human genome. That possibility befuddles me because I have always thought that the definition of genome is simply the entire set of the organism’s genes. I believe that what Angler wrote in her article is true because she is a well known educated science journalist, but I think that it could have been explained much better.