Interviewee: Eric Lander Eric Lander talks about every gene has a distinctive history.

Every gene has its own distinctive history. Take the smell receptor genes, we have a thousand smell receptor genes in our genome, and that says that our vertebrate forebears were really, really interested in olfaction as a sense. And then you look at them and you find out that two-thirds of them are broken, they've all accumulated mutations in the past tens of millions of years, saying that somehow our more recent hominid ancestors lost interest in smell.

hominid ancestors,evolution natural selection,receptor genes,whitehead institute,eric lander,distinctive history,olfaction,forebears,interviewee,mutations,genome,two thirds,dna,tens