Epigenetic control reveals that environmental information alters the read-out of the genes without changing the underlying DNA sequenced code. That’s the difference. From a single gene, epigenetic regulation can provide for 30 thousand different variations of expression.
Scientists undertook the “Genome Project” thinking they were going to discover 150,000 genes because their model was based on genetic determinism that each gene controlled a character of the human. Since proteins build our physical and behavioral traits and there were over 150,000 known proteins, they expected to find 150,000 genes: One gene for each protein was their model.
Instead, they found only 23,000 genes. Since then, we have come to understand that each gene can produce over 30,000 variations. To understand the potential variations of genetic expression you could multiply each gene by 30,000 possibilities.
Now that’s a lot of possibilities!