As you may have noticed, say from technologyland, some words are hopelessly overloaded. "Gene" is such a word in biology. In its purest essence, a gene is "A

As you may have noticed, say from technologyland, some words are hopelessly overloaded. "Gene" is such a word in biology. In its purest essence, a gene is "An inheritable trait." This is from when they were an idea, not a particular thing (yet). I won't go through biology's "central dogma" but encourage all to do so [1]. This will start to shed light on some of the basic different molecules that are at various times refered to as genes. But this easily understandable frmework is only the start as there will be exceptions to everything, and nuances everywhere. If you need a set of decoder rings to read a message are the rings part of the message? Is the message really a message without the rings. and so on off into opinionland. (like I just did) [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=biology%27s+%22central+dogma%22&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=biology%27s+%22central+dogma%...