Skip to main content

Nature via Nuture – Matt Ridley ****

For pretty well as long as people have pondered just what a human being is, the debate has raged over the relative contributions of biological content versus how we’re brought up. At its most trivial, as the advert puts it, “maybe she’s born with it; maybe it’s Maybelline.”
Throughout history the pendulum has swung side to side on preference from nature to nurture and back again. In this exploration of a crucial human conundrum Ridley points out, for example, how the study of twins has over the years been trumpeted as a wonderful breakthrough in understanding while at other times attempts to discredit the approach have been so venomous that it would seem the researchers had made some vast politically incorrect faux pas.
In covering the subject, Ridley manages to combine industrial strength research with a superb style that seems effortless, yet works superbly. The only reason the book doesn’t win the accolade of five stars is that, in the end, fascinating though the debate is, the conclusion is almost inevitably, “well, it’s a bit of both,” or “with everything else equal it’s mostly genetics, but miss out on nurture in a big way and the whole thing falls apart.” (That’s a little over-simplified – it’s probably best summed up when Ridley says “you need nature to absorb nurture.” At some levels this is a truism. You need nature’s contribution of a digestive system to literally absorb nurture. But it also sums up the thesis.)
Because of this repeated conclusion, by about half way through it’s easy to get a little fed up of the repeated cry of “it’s not one thing or the other.” It might well be true, but like all middle-of-the-roadness it lacks danger and excitement.
One other warning. If you are averse to animal experimentation, this is a book you might find unsettling. Even an unbiased observer can’t help but feel a bit queasy at a statement like this: “[scientists] discovered how to stain these columns [in the brain] different colours by injecting dyed amino acids into one eye. They were then able to see what happens when one eye is sewn shut.” More might have been made of the cost/benefit balance in the experiments that are constantly reported throughout the book.
However, that apart, and given the limitations of reality that make “it’s not one thing or the other” an almost inevitable conclusion (which Ridley can hardly be blamed for – I guess we ought to take it up with Ridley’s concept of the “Genome Organizing Device” (GOD for short)) the book does a great job. Only other very slight niggle is the use of numbered notes, which isn’t necessary for a popular science book, simply breaking up the eyeline without adding any benefit. It’s often done elsewhere to try to demonstrate spurious academic gravitas, something Ridley has no need for.
Altogether a superb addition to any popular science library, and you don’t need to have any real interest in biology to get a lot of out. After all – there’s one topic that we’re all interested in, and that’s ourselves.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you 
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more