Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense by Sheldon Krimsky (PDF)

Description

Can genes determine which fifty-year-old will succumb to Alzheimer’s, which citizen will turn out on voting day, and which child will be marked for a life of crime? Yes, according to the Internet, a few scientific studies, and some in the biotechnology industry who should know better. Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber gather a team of genetic experts to argue that treating genes as the holy grail of our physical being is a patently unscientific endeavor. Genetic Explanations urges us to replace our faith in genetic determinism with scientific knowledge about how DNA actually contributes to human development.The concept of the gene has been steadily revised since Watson and Crick discovered the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. No longer viewed by scientists as the cell’s fixed set of master molecules, genes and DNA are seen as a dynamic script that is ad-libbed at each stage of development. Rather than an autonomous predictor of disease, the DNA we inherit interacts continuously with the environment and functions differently as we age. What our parents hand down to us is just the beginning. Emphasizing relatively new understandings of genetic plasticity and epigenetic inheritance, the authors put into a broad developmental context the role genes are known to play in disease, behavior, evolution, and cognition.Rather than dismissing genetic reductionism out of hand, Krimsky and Gruber ask why it persists despite opposing scientific evidence, how it influences attitudes about human behavior, and how it figures in the politics of research funding.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐When I started working in sociobiology, I incurred deep hostility from my academic colleagues and friends for suggesting that biology had anything to do with human behavior. My inspiration was E. O. Wilson’s magnificent 1975 book Sociobiology. This books was mostly about sociality in non-humans (especially ants), but the last chapter was about humans and it got me hooked. Wilson was horribly and unjustly criticized and attacked for this work, even by his Harvard colleagues. See the excellent historical account of Ullica Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).The contributors of this collection claim, with some good reason, that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, with genetics being trotted out to explain just about everything concerning human behavior. “Genetics will continue to play a central role in the life sciences,” the authors write in the Introduction, “but the evidence suggests a far less reductionist role as scientists fully appreciate the dynamic nature of biological systems and the complex interactions among DNA, proteins, and the environment at all levels of organization within the system.” The various contributions to this collection attempt to justify this assessment, with some success.There is a Monster Anomaly in the literature on the genetics of behavior. On the one hand, the sociobiology of human behavior has matured over the last forty years (my own recent contribution, with Samuel Bowles, is A Cooperative Species, Princeton 2011), and behavioral genetics has shown that many aspects of behavior have high heritability (see Robert Plomin, John C. DeFries, Gerald McClearn and Michael McGuffin, Behavioral Genetics, New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 2000). On the other hand, no one has discovered particular genes or gene networks that explain more than a miniscule fraction of the variance in behaviors across individuals. Evelyn Fox Keller, in an insightful chapter, notes that when we read that a certain gene explains some aspect of health or physiology, the author almost always means that when the gene mutates or is otherwise inactivated, the result is the deterioration of the characteristic in question. In other words, we don’t know what the gene does, but we know what happens when it doesn’t do it. That’s not saying much, of course. For instance, if I pull the plug on my TV, I know the picture will go dark. That doesn’t tell me much about how a TV works.The contributors to this volume virtually all believe that genetics (phylogeny) must be combined with development (ontogeny), which is the project of so-called Evo-Devo (for an overview, see Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo by Sean B. Carroll). I consider this to be a really important project, but I think this volume is slanted towards critique a straw-man genetic determinism, without really replacing it with anything. The positive message that developmental pathways are highly creative and contingent is not supported by consistent data. Rather, each author in turn provides his or her personal take on what is wrong with genetic explanations. Of course, sociobiologists (like myself) would NEVER say that a behavioral pattern in humans has a “genetic explanation.” No such notion has empirical support. Rather, we might say that members of a social species have “genetic predispositions” to behave in certain ways under certain conditions. The contributors appear to me to have found it sufficient to attack journalistic excesses rather than the professional literature.

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⭐This book clearly shows how genes do not simply determine functioning. It provides varied accessible examples of the complex interplay between genes and other processes in the ongoing emergence of functioning.

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⭐An amazing collection of excellent essays on how genetics has been used (consciously or unconsciously) to mislead. The first book that anyone interested in genetics and society should read.

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⭐The Book is an excellent well documented guide to the mistakes of convictions based on nDNA.It points out with particularity the many possible and probable mistakes in the process itself.DNA not ready for prime time.

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⭐Genes are interesting and the book is a solid contribution to understanding of important developmental mechanism.Should be of spesial interest for physisians and biologists

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