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The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture

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“Bracingly intelligent, lucid, balanced—witty, too. . . . A scrupulous and charming look at our modern understanding of genes and experience.” — Oliver Sacks

Armed with extraordinary new discoveries about our genes, acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley turns his attention to the nature-versus-nurture debate in a thoughtful book about the roots of human behavior.

Ridley recounts the hundred years' war between the partisans of nature and nurture to explain how this paradoxical creature, the human being, can be simultaneously free-willed and motivated by instinct and culture. With the decoding of the human genome, we now know that genes not only predetermine the broad structure of the brain, they also absorb formative experiences, react to social cues, and even run memory. They are consequences as well as causes of the will.

ISBN-13: 9780060006792

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Publication Date: 07-06-2004

Pages: 352

Product Dimensions: 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

Matt Ridley is the author of books that have sold well over a million copies in 32 languages: THE RED QUEEN, THE ORIGINS OF VIRTUE, GENOME, NATURE VIA NURTURE, FRANCIS CRICK, THE RATIONAL OPTIMIST, THE EVOLUTION OF EVERYTHING, and HOW INNOVATION WORKS. In his bestseller GENOME and in his biography of Francis Crick, he showed an ability to translate the details of genomic discoveries into understandable and exciting stories. During the current pandemic, he has written essays for the Wall Street Journal and The Spectator about the origin and genomics of the virus. His most recent WSJ piece appeared on January 16, 2021. He is a member of the House of Lords in the UK.

Read an Excerpt

The Agile Gene
How Nature Turns on Nurture

Chapter One

The Paragon of Animals

Is man no more than this? Consider him well: Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume: -- Ha! here's three of us are sophisticated! -- Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. King Lear<

Table of Contents

Prologue: Twelve Hairy Men 1
1. The Paragon of Animals 7
2. A Plethora of Instincts 38
3. A Convenient Jingle 69
4. The Madness of Causes 98
5. Genes in the Fourth Dimension 125
6. Formative Years 151
7. Learning Lessons 177
8. Conundrums of Culture 201
9. The Seven Meanings of "Gene" 231
10. A Budget of Paradoxical Morals 249
Epilogue: Homo stramineus: The Straw Man 277
Acknowledgments 281
Endnotes 283
Index 307