The Language of the Genes: Biology, history and the evolutionary future (1994) 5/3/05. Reviewed by Jon Turney Finely honed tales of inheritance and DNA from geneticist Steve Jones.

Humans evolved just like any other creature, and Steve Jones made this touchstone of his widely read introduction to the many facets of genetics. This, Jones's first popular book, began life as a series of BBC Radio Reith lectures in 1991, and retains some of the clarity essential for a long audio broadcast (no paging back for puzzled listeners).

Opened out at book length, the many stories he tells about genes and geneticists already display the plain style and occasionally sardonic wit that enlivens all Jones's books. He uses plenty of literary references and historical anecdotes, gets the science straight, and is always keen to downplay exaggerated claims and puncture other people's pretentions.

Jones is an evolutionary geneticist himself, an expert on snails, and unlike many recent writers is not preoccupied with molecular events. He is as interested in what you can infer about interactions between human groups by analysing lists of surnames in a phone book, or what the relations between different languages may tell us about human migration, as in base sequences and DNA. That said, the two most important metaphors he uses throughout are genes as a language, as the title suggests, and the importance of maps of all kinds.

After another decade of gene talk, the range of these chapters is impressive. There are clear, brief treatments of topics that have yielded whole books for other authors – sex chromosomes (Jones got a book out of just one of those himself), nature and nurture, genes and disease, evolution of proto-humans, and of fully human populations. In each case he highlights the selection pressures that may have shaped our current genetic make-up, and the limitations as well as the strengths of evolutionary accounts of human characteristics and their histories.

This 'Mr Sensible' persona is well suited to the material. As he points out, the history of human genetics, and eugenics, is full of ridiculous claims and sinister policies. He begins with the Victorian polymath Francis Galton and his conception of eugenics, and devotes a chapter to the supposed genetics of race. He is guardedly optimistic, though, about future applications of genetic knowledge.

His final topic is future evolution, now most commonly discussed in terms of genetic engineering. In terms of more traditional natural selection, though, Jones thinks our evolution may have come to a near stop. But either way, he is dubious about any planned interventions. Now, as in the past, he reckons, inadvertant change – what he calls evolution by mistake – is likely to be our main effect on ourselves. And it will have to be quite significant to match the past influences of inventing agriculture, stone tools, private property or even the bicycle, that great preventer of inbreeding.

The gene-mapping bits of Jones's original text are now out of date, of course. But the updating for the second edition brings in all the big topics of the 1990s, from genetically modified foods to Dolly the sheep, and means the book remains one of the best all-round introductions to genetics.

Book details

Paperback 352 pages (September 18, 2000)

Publisher: Flamingo

Language: English

ISBN: 0006552439