| I think you are focusing on gene too much too. At the gene level it is discrete yes. It isn't at specimen scale, and appears more continuous. It's very possible ancient Greeks didn't understand the discrete aspect, it doesn't mean they didn't know in some ways more than we know of evolution. I would assume they did given the numerous incredible polyglot thinkers we find traces of. Traces, it would seem the biggest part of ancient times writings are gone. And why just thinking of the Greeks, so many civilisations have vanished, many which the left over of their produces confuse us. More civilization disappeared than the count of those we know had existed. The food stocks, cattles and other pets that accompany us today were the result of non natural selections spanning many human generations. To think civilisations that were able to accomplish that didn't have, in a way, a more comprehensive understanding of natural selection is pretty condescending, or naive of our own understandings. Sure they probably didn't come up with Crisp, they may not have been able to observed the structures of DNA, they may not have even known how bacteria looked like. Given the challenge I'm in admiration for their findings given how blind we assume those people were. |
As for Mukherjee, while his Emperor of All Maladies about cancer was brilliant, The Gene (and Mukherjee's New Yorker article that he expanded to make his book) has a lot of issues as many geneticists and molecular biologists such as Walter Gilbert and Tom Maniatis pointed out at the time.