Genome: The Autobiography Of Species In 23 Chapters: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

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And I'm afraid the writing is just not good enough for any of the briefly discussed ideas to stick in your brain, unless this book is literally your first exposure to the field of genetics at all (like, you didn't even learn about it at a high school level). Written at the turn of the century, the book is 10 years old and with the exception of the first human genome being transcribed, to a lay person like me it doesn't seem dated at all. However, you really have to wait for the last few chapters of the book for his to really get started. One way to increase serotonin is to increase insulin levels thus eating a bag of chocolate chip cookies can do the trick.

Genes act as if they have selfish goals, an idea first proposed and made popular by Richard Dawkins in his famous book, The Selfish Gene. For example, the chapter Fate, which I found the most fascinating, sought to prove that a good portion of our lives is written in our genetic code. By picking one newly discovered gene from each of the 23 human chromosomes and telling its story, Matt Ridley traces the history of our species and its ancestors.Keeping in mind that this book was written 20 years ago -which of course if a short life-span for literature, but a very long one for science - this is very well written, ingeniously presented and fun to engage with. I say that because after reading a number of books on the subject, there are parts of the book that I had to go back and reread a number of times to fully understand the point he was trying get across. Genome has been reviewed in scientific journals including Nature [1] and in medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, where Robert Schwartz notes that Ridley speculates, "sometimes wildly". Also just as physical sex is determined by genes so are many of the attitudes consistent with that sex. As Ridley takes up his story, chromosome by chromosome, his skill as a journalist–author is apparent.

Gene mutations can lead to disease, and sometimes there is a balancing effect between resistance to one disease at the expense of being susceptible to another disease.He addresses not only the ethical quandaries faced by contemporary scientists but the reductionist danger in equating inheritability with inevitability. The account of the (gene-carrying) retrovirus therapy and other genetic `engineering' tricks was riveting. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The thrust of Ridley's political philosophy is in complex systems control is not centralized but distributed - a view I fully subscribe to.

People, particularly in childhood, have an instinct for grammar, an inherent ability to arrange words in a meaningful way. Eugenics a century ago, based on faulty knowledge of genetics, led to immoral actions by governments and the US Supreme Court, pushing through compulsory sterilization of people such as those with trisomy 21 which causes Down syndrome. The biologist Jerry Coyne, writing in the London Review of Books, criticises Genome as "at once instructive and infuriating.

There is no evidence showing the difference is due to heritability and in fact blacks raised among whites perform just as well as whites on IQ tests.

There is also quite a bit of history, and not just the usual mention of Darwin on the Galapagos islands with his finches. Genome helped me understand some of the science of what they were reporting with regard to relatives that I would discover. Matt Ridley’s Genome is the book that explains it what it is, how it works, and what it portends for the future Arguably the most significant scientific discovery of the new century, the mapping of the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that make up the human genome raises almost as many questions as it answers.His books have sold over 800,000 copies, been translated into twenty-seven languages, and have won several awards. For example, people living near the Three Mile Island nuclear plant at the time of the accident had more cancers than expected.