Humbled by Nature. You could have just as easily been a worm.

The geneticist Antoine Danchin once used the parable of the Delphic boat to describe the process by which individual genes could produce the observed complexity of the natural world. In the proverbial story, the oracle at Delphi is asked to consider a boat on a river whose planks have begun to rot. As the wood decays, each plank is replaced, one by one — and after a decade, no plank is left from the original boat. Yet, the owner is convinced that it is the same boat. How can the boat be the same boat — the riddle runs — if every physical element of the original has been replaced?

The answer is that the “boat” is not made of planks but of the relationship between planks. If you hammer a hundred strips of wood atop each other, you get a wall; if you nail them side to side, you get a deck; only a particular configuration of planks, held together in particular relationship, in a particular order, makes a boat.

Genes operate in the same manner. Individual genes specify individual functions, but the relationship among genes allows physiology. The genome is inert without these relationships.

That humans and worms have about the same number of genes — around twenty thousand — and yet the fact that only one of these two organisms is capable of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel suggests that the number of genes is largely unimportant to the physiological complexity of the organism.

“It is not what you have,” as a certain Brazilian samba instructor once told me, “it is what you do with it.”

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These words are from The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee, a book I could not stop myself from reading every single day (especially the first half). Don’t let the 608 pages scare you. It’s an eye-opener to the uninitiated particularly if you are fascinated by science. I felt like an idiot — I’ve passed on my genes to two kids and until this book, I was largely unaware of the stories and the immense work that went into genetics over the past century. It’s sad that our sources of knowledge, our schools and the media, focus so little on real science and scientists. We all want to get rich or famous, and that too very quickly, and this is because of the disproportionate attention given to such feats.

More importantly, I found this book more spiritual than any book I’ve read before. The answers we’re seeking are so deeply encoded within us, and so well regulated, almost algorithmic, and following precise laws, that it’s better to devote our minds (and our genes) to finding these laws and algorithms, rather than hypothesize endlessly on ourselves.

One seemingly small but immensely meaningful question — Why do tall parents have tall kids, can fill a person’s life, and that’s a life well lived, where the mind has no time to dwell on lifeless things. How about we encourage ourselves and our children to start a career with a question, rather than with a skill or a destination?

Let’s not forget, 20000 genes can build a worm, and can also build an Albert Einstein.