In his classic essay, The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone (collected in Bully for Brontosaurus), the late Stephen Jay Gould tracked the occurence of the phrase "about the size of a fox terrier" through several biology textbooks in the first half of the twentieth century. This phrase was and is a persistent descriptor for Hyracotherium/Eohippus, the earliest and smallest member of the horse phylogeny. A combination of popular memorability, creative apathy, and naked plagiarism has kept this metaphor running since the 1920s though many people ninety years on won't know what a fox terrier looks like.

Gould likened this phrase to a gene, in that it could propagate through generations (of texbooks) and conferred a trait (explanatory power vis-a-vis Eohippus size). Mostly it would be faithfully copied. However, Gould showed that variations in the popular phrase ("about the size of a fox terrier", "fox terrier-sized") could be tracked through generations of textbooks like mutations leading to allelelic variations can be tracked through a pedigree. The Independent (or their source), in referring to the human gene introduced into rice, have unwittingly released a mutant form: they got their spelling wrong. Correctly, it's CYP2B6, not CPY2B6. CYP isn't a random trigrammaton but a TLA that means something. This provides a handy marker, a sort of memetic cookie, for tracking some people's reading. Following the Google, Yahoo! and MS news searches tells you who gets their information from misspelt sources.