Genuine Puzzles In Biology?

Hi Barabara,I think you have things a little confused. There is no such gene as Olfactory, what there are are a large number of distinct olfactory receptor (OR) genes, which encode a variety of different membrane bound receptor proteins.What we find with these genes is not what you state, Humans have roughly the same number of functional OR genes as chimpanzees. There are ~400 human OR genes that appear to be functional as protein coding genes and ~353 similarly functional OR genes in the chimpanzee (Gilad et al., 2005).Exactly what you are talking about is unclear.TTFN,WK

I think he may be using epigenetic in a more archaic sense, if you can call terms from the 1940s archaic, which essentially means developmental. So the phrase would probably be more easily understood as developmental or morphological complexity. Alternatively it may be used to refer to all non-genetic factors influencing development, but I'm not sure how this would fit.Or it could be something else entirely.TTFN,WK