Nature via nurture: Genes, experience and what makes us human (2003) 1/2/05. Reviewed by Jon Turney Matt Ridley reconciles nature and nurture.

Back in the early days of the Human Genome Project, critics charged that the whole effort would encourage genetic explanations of everything. We would live in a reductionist world, the supposed prisoners of our genes. One response was that, if the opponents of a gene-centred view of things were correct, then they need not really worry as the genome project would subvert just that view. The more we understood about genes, the more clearly we would see that they play a part, but only a part, in making each of us who we are.

So, in a way, it has proved. But as this riveting new book from the author of Genome shows, it has also shown something rather more interesting. Genes are still involved in almost every aspect of human or animal behaviour you care to mention. But the precise way they are involved depends on complex feedbacks from the particular human or animal's individual history. And these do not lead to environment overcoming genetic influence in some mysterious way - the threadbare notion of nature versus nurture. Rather, they operate by influencing patterns of gene activity.

As we discover how genes get turned on and off, how sensitive the key segments of DNA called promoters are to a host of influences, we see that the pattern of genetic activity comes to incorporate a record of environmental effects: nature via nurture.

Ridley, a brilliant writer not to be confused with his equally distinguished scientific namesake Mark Ridley, fills out this idea with a pointful selection of the latest scientific findings about gene action and inaction, and how they are regulated. These are laid on top of an account of the key thinkers from the 19th and early 20th century who in his view have contributed to our understanding of human nature. Some are now identified with hereditarian views, some with environmentalism but all - from Darwin to Durkheim - got something right.

More important, according to Ridley, we can synthesise the correct bits of all their theories if we get hold of the new idea that "the more we lift the lid on the genome, the more vulnerable to experience genes appear to be". Active genes, in other words, are both cause and consequence of the things we do.

Bonuses along the way include a comprehensive dissection of all the different meanings of the word gene, and an excellent review of all the things which have been held to cause schizophrenia which is a strong antidote to the idea that there is a single cause of anything as complex as human (mis)behaviour. The book's outlook has much in common with Bateson and Martin's Design for a Life, but goes further because it has so much more data from new work on gene regulation. Read it, and you will not soon forget the picture of genes as "exquisite mechanisms for translating experience into action".

If you go along with Ridley, nature and nurture are not so much reconciled as united to create an entirely new, dynamic picture of how each organism develops.

Book details

Paperback 328 pages (May 2004)
Publisher: Perennial
Language: English
ISBN: 1841157465