The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ Read Online Free PDF

obesity, religiosity, homosexuality, shyness, stupidity, or any other aspect of mind or body has no place on the platform of genetic discourse.” (Jablonka and Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions , pp. 6–7.)
         This obliterates the long-standing metaphor of genes as blueprints with elaborate predesigned instructions for eye color, thumb size, mathematical quickness, musical sensitivity, etc .
       Deploying the right metaphor is everything in the communication and understanding of science. In the case of genetics, our metaphors have sadly led us astray. “There is no clear, technical notion of ‘information’ in molecular biology,” writes biologist and philosopher Sahotra Sarkar. “It is little more than a metaphor that masquerades as a theoretical concept and … leads to a misleading picture of possible explanations in molecular biology.”
    Today’s popular understanding of genes, heredity, and evolution is not just crude; it is profoundly misleading. It may feel true, thanks to the elegance of the “blueprint” and “code” metaphors, and thanks to the lack of a cogent dissent. But from the vantage of twenty-first-century scientific understanding, any brand of genetic determinism obscures more than it enlightens. We’ve created a thick, semipermanent veil that shrouds the more interesting, and more hopeful, reality.
    “What we need here,” writes John Jay College’s Susan Oyama (a leader in the dynamic systems movement), “is the stake-in-the-heart move, and the heart is the notion that some influences are more equal than others, that form, or its modern agent, information, exists before the interactions in which it appears and must be transmitted to the organism either through the genes or by the environment.” (Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information , p. 27.)
         genes—all twenty-two thousand of them—are more like volume knobs and switches .
       This is my attempt to come up with a metaphor that will resonate and that accurately captures the dynamic quality of genes.
         Estimates of the actual number of genes vary .
    Although the completion of the Human Genome Project was celebrated in April 2003 and sequencing of the human chromosomes is essentially “finished,”the exact number of genes encoded by the genome is still unknown. October 2004 findings from the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, led in the United States by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the Department of Energy (DOE), reduce the estimated number of human protein-coding genes from 35,000 to only 20,000–25,000, a surprisingly low number for our species. Consortium researchers have confirmed the existence of 19,599 protein-coding genes in the human genome and identified another 2,188 DNA segments that are predicted to be protein-coding genes. In 2003, estimates from gene-prediction programs suggested there might be 24,500 or fewer protein-coding genes. The Ensembl genome-annotation system estimates them at 23,299. (Human Genome Project, “How Many Genes Are in the Human Genome?”)
    Also: New data “threaten to throw the very concept of ‘the gene’—either as a unit of structure or as a unit of function—into blatant disarray.” (Keller, The Century of the Gene , p. 67.)
         Many of those knobs and switches can be turned up/down/on/off at any time—by another gene or by any minuscule environmental input . This flipping and turning takes place constantly.
    Experiential factors are now known to influence gene expression through several mechanisms, including (but not limited to) those involving the actions of steroid hormones … For example, testosterone levels change as a function of sexual experience, and hormones like testosterone are known to be able to diffuse across both cellular and nuclear membranes where—once they have been bound by specific receptors—they can bind with DNA to regulate gene expression. (Moore, “Espousing interactions and