Book Audience

Genome breaks down each of the human chromosomes a chapter at a time. The book can get technical at times but the concepts are understandable for nonscientists.

Main Idea

How genetics and environment influence our view of the world and our identity.

What I took away from this book

It is amazing that something so small can impact so much of our lives.

How I am using what I have learned

Humans are complex systems in a world of complex systems. Before I make a decision, I try to consider the affects that decision will have beyond the immediate impact.

My Key Takeaways

• “In one of the great diversions of all time, for nearly a century social scientists managed to persuade thinkers of many kinds that biological causality was determinism while environmental causality preserved free will; and animals had instincts but human beings did not.”

• “Marxism fell when the Berlin wall was built, though it took until the wall came down before some people realized that subservience to an all-powerful state could not be made enjoyable however much propaganda accompanied it.”

• Body odor may play a role in determining if someone from the opposite sex is genetically different. The contraceptive pill affects the sense of smell of woman using it. This affect may have the unintended consequences of causing women to be attracted to the body odor of men that are not as genetically different.

• No one is in charge. No one should be put in charge. In a world full of complex systems, it is a bad idea to put someone in charge of a system.

• “Economies are not centralised systems; they are markets with decentralised, diffuse controls.”

• Job status is a better predictor of heart attack than poor health. Heart disease is a symptom of lack of control.

• “No alpha-male monkey was ever such an intransigent and implacable controller of subordinates’ lives as the social services of the state are of people dependent of welfare.”

• “Far from behaviour being at the mercy of our biology, our biology is often at the mercy of our behaviour.”

• When flaws in personality are considered innate people are more accepting of the flaws and can be a release from the flaws.

• Compulsive people have high levels of serotonin. Impulsive people have low serotonin levels.

• Impulsive, antisocial and depressed people have lower cholesterol levels than population average.

• “Genes are just chunks of software that can run on any system: they use the same code and do the same jobs. Even after 530 million years of separation, our computer can recognise a fly’s software and vice versa.”

• Learning is the opposite of instinct. Instinct is determined by genetics. Learning is behavior altered by experience.

• “There is a commonly held belief that learning is good, instinct bad - or, rather, that learning is advanced and instinct primitive.”

• Human genome is the accumulated useful information learned from the environment.

• Rogue cells that want to reproduce occur everyday, all over our bodies. If our bodies are unable to control these rogue cells, the result is called cancer.

• Things that cause cancer have a commonality. They all damage DNA.

• Oncoviruses are cancer causing viruses.

• Cancer is a disease of the genes. “A genetic disease within an organ of the body, but not in the reproductive cells, could still be a genetic disease.”

• Craig Venter is an interesting person that I want to learn more about.

• Gene therapy became possible when it was discovered that retroviruses could make DNA copies from RNA. A retrovirus can be altered to genetically modify a person aka gene therapy.

• Hume’s fork: Either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the result of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them.

• Appetite for learning more important than aptitude. The intellectual appetite could be gene related.

• “The very phrase ‘brave new world’ has come to mean such a dystopia brought into being by central control and advance science working hand-in-hand.”

• “Full responsibility for one’s actions is a necessary fiction without which the law would flounder, but it is a fiction all the same.”

• Free will is a way to hold people accountable for their actions.

• “If genes can affect behaviour and behaviour can affect genes, then the causality is circular. And in a system of circular feedbacks, hugely unpredictable results can follow from simple deterministic processes.”

• Chaos theory- the study of apparently random or unpredictable behavior in systems governed by deterministic laws.

• “Human behaviour is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.” review pages 310-312

• “This interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.”

• “Of course, there is no single gene, but instead there is something infinitely more uplifting and magnificent: a whole human nature, flexibly preordained in our chromosomes and idiosyncratic to each of us. Everybody has a unique and different, endogenous nature. A self.”