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This is Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds.

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Listening to this next interview might fundamentally change the way you regard

yourself and the question of what it is to be an individual human being.

It might also alter your view on whether human lives are determined by their genes.

Here's the eminent philosopher of science, John Dupre.

John Dupre, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you for having me here.

The topic we're going to focus on is genomics.

Most people know what genetics is I think but what's genomics?

Well genetics originates in experiments on inheritance and is is essentially a rather

atomistic theory of how things are inherited so you hear genes for this

and that genes for various traits characters of organisms and this originates

from breeding experiments with flies, mice,

Mendels, peas, where you track traits,

and people hypothesize there were genes that carry these traits.

In genomics, we are starting to think much more holistically about the DNA

the structures which carry DNA which for a while were sort of associated with the

traditional genes as these trait carriers and what

...