A review of Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley, 344 pp., NY: Harper Collins, 2000, $26. James Brody, Ph.D.

Genome has been with us for 18 months. Nonetheless, Ridley's prose is still engaging, his outlooks refreshing and he has been praised widely, perhaps because Genome is like a newspaper: gossip and facts, teasers and insight --- real life pressed into a linear order and in chunks that look familiar to most of us. First, he discusses genes in the order of their size ---
bigger genes happen to have smaller numbers. He next builds a story around one trait that is associated with each gene. His chapter headings have a gene number and a verbal icon for one of our favorite obsessions: Life, Species, His-tory, Fate, Environment, Intelligence, Instinct, Conflict, Self-Interest, Disease, Stress, Personality, Self-Assembly, Pre-History, Immortality, Sex, Memory, Death, Cures, Prevention, Politics, Eugenics, and Free Will. These are all divisions of the Times. Ridley joins multiple topics inside each chapter but without subheadings and with few cross references between chapters. Chapter 11: "Personality" is not unusual. It pivots on the gene for a controversial dopamine receptor known as D4DR. In 12 pages we cover the gene itself, Dean Hamer's thoughts about homosexuality, hierarchic standing, bits of Jerome Kagan's ideas, thrill seekers, Prozac, cholesterol, serotonin, aggression, and Mike McGuire on social status in vervets. Oddly, Ridley omitted ADHD, the second most heritable psychiatric disorder after Asperger's syndrome and also linked to D4DR.

There is fascinating, scattered information on trade offs that are associated with our resistance to different pathogens. For example, genes that make us more resistant to tu-berculosis also make us less resistant to osteoporosis but, in double doses, cause Tay Sachs disease.

We can be more resistant to typhoid if less resistant to cystic fibrosis; more resistant to malaria if less to cholera. A Nobel Prize lurks in some of Ridley's material. The same gene, IGF2R, (Insulin Growth Factor), that may raise our I. Q. and help us to be a fast talker or snappy dresser also appears to suppress liver cancer. Ridley mentions this coincidence in his chapter on intelligence but, in a separate chapter, 30 pages later, Ridley comments that IGF2R is maternally imprinted and opposes its mirror form from dad, IGF2. The mater-nal version, the -R form, limits fetal growth, the paternal increases it. The tie to intelligence? Other studies suggest that maternally imprinted genes in mice are more influen-tial in formation of the cerebral cortex but paternally imprinted genes give mice large bodies and larger hypothalami but no cortex. Grow big, be fast, be impulsive, and get cancer? The possibilities are immense and nearly irresistible but no one has organized them unless Haig and Trivers aren't telling the rest of us their secrets. There are similar opportunities in the phenomenon of immune suppression by cortisol, mentioned in Ridley's chapter on stress.

There's an obvious mechanism and pay off but no one has described it yet. Things not taught in many public schools Ridley brocades facts and stories like Robert Silvers does images and sometimes attains not only coherence but also brilliance and passion. Eugenics, free will, genes and environments, and genomic conflict are four of many photo mosaics. Eugenics: Karl Pearson told Joshua Wedgwood, "What is social is right, and there is no definition of right beyond that." The '30s socialists decided to suppress reproductive options for those of us who just didn't fit in. Sweden sterilized 60,000 people in this cause and the United States, 100,000: Britain, however, did not because a libertarian hero held the bridge. Wedgwood, whose forebears collaborated with Darwins and even bred with them, was an MP and appalled by the broad assumption of power over individuals by the state. He and a few other libertarians filibustered and tabled 200 pieces of pro-eugenics legislation against Churchill's and the majority's efforts to pass them. (There's lots more to this story, I won't spoil it for you.)

Free Will: I spoke in Manhattan in November '99 about reinterpreting "free will" as the expression of our unique genetic preferences. My small but very gifted New York audi-ence didn't think I had beat determinism by aligning my genetic interests with my free will. They were right. Ridley independently made a similar interpretation about free will when he finished his last chapter in December. He distinguishes events that are "determined" from events that are "unpredictable." Find the gap between "determined" and "unpredictable" and discover freedom. I'm not sure this works either. The word "free" is a semantic artifact of adolescent defiance. Drop "free will," substitute "personal will" and regain consistency with behavior genetics and with the rest of science. In any case, Ridley uses a quote that Lawrence Wright (1997) originally got from Lindon Eaves: "Freedom (!) is the ability to stand up and transcend the limitations of the environment....If you're going to be pushed around, would you rather be pushed around by your environment, which is not you, or by your genes, which in some sense is who you are." (Ridley, p. 313, exclamation added by JB). "Personal will" ought to work better, even for Eaves' quote. Genes and Environments: Frans De Waal (2001) can discuss genes and environment without slighting one or the other; anyone else will take a favorite. Ridley is no exception and handles the task in his usual manner, aiming a salvo toward environmental determinism and perhaps the followers of one U.K. biologist who, like the Vatican, requires 4 initials on his display. Lewontin (2000) has a better idea: environments only become environments after genes organize them from settings; organisms and settings together make "constructions."

Similarly, Plomin and others carefully tell us how human genes pick from environments (Brody, 2001; Plomin et al, 2000; Rowe, 1994, Scarr, 1992). Turner (2000), Dawkins 1982) and other scholars do likewise for the genes in other species, including plants, that build modified environments for individuals and for whole communities. This "active" Darwinism (Popper, 1994; Brody, 1999) complements our traditional understanding of natural selection. In stable conditions, the features of niches are selected, amplified, and retained across generations according to the receptor preferences of their occupants (Turner, 2000; Lewontin, 2000). Ridley mentions NONE of this literature or very few of the exciting developments in met-rical genetic traits and quantitative trait loci, physically dispersed genes that act as a common node to vary a particular behavior trait (Plomin et al, 2000). Through these in-sights, contemporary behavior genetics has sharply reduced our need for diseases to make genes interesting. Genomic Conflict: I am grateful for a quote from William Hamilton on p. 120: "Seemingly inescapable conflict within diploid organisms came to me both as a new agonizing challenge and at the same time a release ... My own conscious and seem-ingly indivisible self was turning out far from what I had imagined ... I was an ambassador ordered abroad by some fragile coalition, a bearer of conflicting orders from the un-easy masters of a divided empire... I am pretending to a unity that, deep inside myself, I now know does not exist. (Hamilton, 1996, pp. 134-135). There really should be a Nobel for Hamilton because of this paragraph. As Haig (1997) expressed it, genes form political organizations that make selfish decisions and lie, cheat, and steal from one another. Further, we are becoming knowledgeable of the con-flicts that occur between genes donated from our mother and those from our father and we sense these conflicts when we notice indecision or guilt about our daily conduct (Haig, 1999).

However, Ridley split the material on genomic conflict and didn't list it in his index al-though he listed David Haig. You have to paste some of Chapter XY (between 6 and 7) to some of Chapter 15: Sex. Genomic conflict could also have been an element in his chapter on free will. I would have liked GC better in one segment and as a foundation to human moral conflict, a basis that we can share with a chimpanzee or with my cat. This step further joins humans into life's web, that we no longer have a monopoly on obligation or guilt. Surprises The index is lousy. Furthermore, the notes are organized by gene number but without mentioning page numbers; the page headings in the main text are by chapter title, not gene number. In either the index or the notes, you gotta look around more to find what you want. This seems cheap and careless in a $26 bestseller that begs for personal cross-referencing. Further, there are some odd conclusions in Genome. Ridley sketches an argument that serotonin mediates not assurance but anxiety. This is opposite the prevailing weight of research whether from humans or from worms. He links decreases in cholesterol to in-creased aggression and suicide; I've seen those behaviors tied to the reduced availabil-ity of fats, especially the omega 3s. He almost resurrects canalization and the Baldwin Effect. Ridley's Cambrian explosion is dated at 1 billion years ago, about 500 million be-fore the rest of us had ours. And recent discoveries hint that there was no such thing for any of us. Ridley discounts the Aquatic Ape theory, that our ontogeny may have fol-lowed a shoreline, but he does it without mentioning Elaine Morgan or Marc Verhaegen. Finally, our autobiography as a species may exist but Matt lied, it's not in Genome. We will have to check the crib notes left in other species before we can put our own into or-der. Summary Ridley remarked in a "Publishers Weekly" interview that he wanted to write a book "a mile wide and an inch deep." Thus, Genome has an Internet style that contrasts with the architectural prose of Jacob or Lewontin, or of de Waal in his latest book, "The Ape and the Sushi Master." Genome is about news and can be as fun as a Sunday Times. You can select news that fits your bias and there's enough in Genome for anyone to find many points of agree-ment. You can clip what you like, scribble in red, and ignore the rest, including the stuff that irritates you because it's in your specialty and you know more than Ridley. Also like the Times, some of Genome will be out of date before the ink dries. For example, the estimated size of the human genome plummeted from 100,000 to 32,000 genes, each of which may have 12-14 versions, and proteins have become the next frontier in emergent biological organizations. The book's structure is awkward because Ridley forces the interactive net of our genes into a linear sequence. Emergent products, however, have many paths so that nets loop forever while, in contrast, trees, books, and human narratives have a start and a finish. Jacob (1998) used a different model, combinatorial mosaics of genes that work together and that work through receptors to pick, build, and modify environments (Lewontin, 2000). These two works form a triangle with Ridley's, giving his ideas a much-needed, more interactive, structure. (Also, Time, Love, Memory, Weiner, 2000, is crafted in ar-gument and style and should be very high on your list, complementing Genome.) Could Genome be recreated but in a web format? Or in an electronic version that lets the reader make personal links? (Harper and Collins, are you listening?) Genome was "...being completed, a few months before the end of a millennium..." (p. 301) and made it to my bookseller in January. Amazing! Further, Genome has an Amazon sales rank of 7601 and was in their Top 10 for 2000. Even Newt Gingrich loved Ge-nome in his April review. (De Waal was similarly blessed: Newt gave copies of Chimpanzee Politics to the freshmen members of Congress in 1994.) Matt, his publisher, and both of their accountants MUST be smiling and none of them thinking about his skipping a final editor.

References:

Alcock, J. (2001) The Triumph of Sociobiology. Oxford: London.

Bloom, H. (2000) Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. NY: Wiley.

Brody, J. (1999) Active Darwinism, free will, and psychotherapy. Paper presented to the New York Chapter, Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychia-try, 11/13/99 at St. John the Divine.

---------- (2001) A Cuckoo's Egg in Darwin's Nest?: Active Genotype-Environment Correlation. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, London, June.

Dawkins, R. (1982) The Extended Phenotype. NY: Oxford.

Dunbar, R. (1996) Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Haig, D. (1997) The social gene. In J. Krebs & N. Davies (Eds.) Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, 4th Edition, Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Science, pp. 284-306.

---------- (1999) Genetic conflicts and the divided self. A talk given at Hunter School of Social Work, May 6, 1999. Hamilton, W. (1996) Narrow Roads of Geneland. Vol. 1: Evolution of Social Behavior. NY: Freeman Spektrum.

Jacob, F. (1998) Of Flies, Mice, and Men. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lewontin, R. (2000) Triple Helix. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plomin, R., DeFries J, McClearn G, & McGuffin, P. (2000) Behavioral Genetics (4th ed.) NY: Worth.

Rowe D (1994) The Limits of Family Influence: Genes, Experience, and Behavior. NY: Guilford.

Scarr, S. (1992) Developmental theories for the 1990s: Development and individual differences. Child Development. 63, 1-19.

Turner, J. Scott (2000) The extended organism: The physiology of animal-built structures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

de Waal, F. (2001) The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist. NY: Basic Books.

Weiner, J. (1999) Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior. NY: Knopf

Wright, L. (1997) Twins: And What They Tell Us about Who We Are. NY: Wiley.

James Brody is a psychologist in private practice near Philadelphia and Editor for the Evolutionary Psychology/Clinical Sociobiology Forum on Behavior.Net.

Published   2001.09.05