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

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This really helped me to figure out a bit more about what I would be studying and gave me something interesting to talk about in my interview. It was worth reading to find out some interesting historical facts, but if I was choosing one book to read about genetics I'd pick something published more recently. This fascinating journey shows the influence of genes, from condemning us to diseases to influencing our intelligence and guiding the development of our bodies and brains.

The hypocritical chapter on eugenics, which decries the practice despite being sandwiched between two chapters implicitly defending it, is likely to annoy even people who don't particularly care about gender issues, and any remaining patience I had for Ridley he lost when he quoted Gould on IQ.The first chromosome, for example, contains our oldest genes, genes which we have in common with plants. If you are interested in science, biology or evolution just a little bit then read this, you won't be disappointed. Evolution by natural selection is about the "competition between genes, using individual and occasionally societies as their temporary vehicles.

At the same time, the female's genes have attacked the poor Y chromosome to such an extent that it has all but shut down, being a tiny little stub of a gene. Environmental triggers can actually switch genes on and off; genes in turn can make us more or less sensitive to our environment. There isn't enough of interest in the rest of the book to begin to salvage it, or to recommend it over any book on roughly the same subject. But when Ridley ventures into a discussion of the human genome project and ongoing efforts to sequence the human genome, his analysis is brief, very superficial, and misinformed. The reason is that low-grade jobs lead to the lack of control over one's fate, leading to an increase in stress hormones, followed by a rise in blood pressure and heart rate.I read "Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters" almost as soon as it came out in 2000, which made me more curious as to my own origins. Ridley relates how, with age, as we often become increasingly able to select our own influences, the `genetic' proportion of our intelligence thus tends to increase.

Well, being a numbskull, I hadn't realised that gene theory has almost died in relation to the context of this book.This approach enables his book to be far reaching, looking at our relationship to other owners of the gene, from bacteria to great apes, spanning from the earliest forms of life to the genes that could be responsible for intelligence and language. Some genes code for proteins but many are simply switches dictating when another gene will be active.