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Consider just three of Earth's inhabitants: a bright yellow daffodil that greets the spring, the single-celled creature called Thermococcus that lives in boiling hot springs, and you. Even a science-fiction writer inventing a story set on a distant planet could hardly imagine three more different forms of life. Yet you, Thermococcus, and the daffodil are related! Indeed, all of the Earth's billions of living things are kin to each other.And every living thing does one thing the same way: To make more of itself, it first copies its molecular instruction manual-its genes-and then passes this information on to its offspring. This cycle has been repeated for three and a half billion years.A century ago, researchers began to answer questions with the help of a science called genetics. Get a refresher course on the basics It's likely that when you think of heredity you think first of DNA, but in the past few years, researchers have made surprising findings about another molecular actor that plays a starring role. Check out the modern view of RNA in Chapter 2, "RNA and DNA Revealed: New Roles, New Rules."When genetics first started, scientists didn't have the tools they have today. They could only look at one gene, or a few genes, at a time. Now, researchers can examine all of the genes in a living organism-its genome-at once. They are doing this for organisms on every branch of the tree of life and finding that the genomes of mice, frogs, fish, and a slew of other creatures have many genes similar to our own.So why doesn't your brother look like your dog or the fish in your aquarium? It's because of evolution. From metabolism to medicines to agriculture, the science of genetics affects us every day. It is part of life ... part of your life!Chapter 1 How Genes WorkChapter 2 RNA and DNA Revealed: New Roles, New RulesIn Chapter 3 Life's Genetic TreeChapter 4 Genes Are UsChapter 5 21st-Century Genetics ... Read more