I was handed this book by a mentor of mine who recommended I check it out as a way to talk about the social impacts of genetic research. The book is out of date, published in 1999, but I think the concept is still interesting. The book consists of 23 chapters, one for each chromosome in the human genome, and each chapter highlights how genes have impacted humans and their life. The stories don’t cover the whole genome, and they don’t cover all of genetics, but it’s a collection of snapshots of genetics.
I only have a few qualms with it, and of course it has to do with the sex chromosomes. When talking about the X chromosome, he talks about how genetic determinants of autism have been found there. And then uses that to hypothesize that this is why more boys have autism than girls, which isn’t true. Autism just looks different in girls, and the focus on autistic boys means that many girls with autism are not diagnosed until later in life. I might give this one to him, not much was known about autism in the 90s, so probably an honest mistake.
What I am less likely to give him though is what he proceeds to say about the X chromosome. The X chromosome is one of the sex chromosomes, which any transphobe will love to prattle on about how two Xs make a women and the XY combo makes a man. Those of us who are trans and recognize that intersex is a thing know better. There are plenty of people outside of the XX/XY binary and some that are XX but anatomically male or vice versa. Anyways, towards the end of the chapter Ridley starts making some absurd statements about how his daughter’s excitement about a doll couldn’t have anything to do with how she was raised, and similarly for how his son loves toy trucks. He then attempts to drive this home by talking about someone who unfortunately had to be castrated shortly after birth (infection I believe) and was put on hormonal treatment and whose parents were instructed to raise them as a girl. When they found out about this later in life, they immediately went back to living as a man. This is not the slam dunk story the author thinks it is, this is one person who was forced into a gender they did not want and did not get a say in it. Not a single trans person was asked, and if they were, the author might have found out that gender confirming surgery (when voluntary) has extremely low regret rates. And that those same surgeries are forcibly done on intersex infants (similar to this individual) to try and “correct” their sex. It’s gross and could have easily been avoided. No gender is not entirely socialized, but neither is it entirely biological and to claim that is transphobic but also obviously wrong.
My more minor qualm also has to do with the eugenics chapter. Overall it’s well written, but there’s this interesting line about how countries with strong influence of the Roman Catholic Church were more immune to eugenic legislation. And then it never gets expanded on! I have no idea which countries these are since Italy is never mentioned, or what relevance this is to the discussion about how Great Britain resisted eugenic laws. Which just, how did that get past the editors?
The author also has this quip where he constantly goes back and corrects himself. He will make a statement, describe it, and then in the next paragraph he’ll correct himself and say that what he just explained is wrong. Which is an interesting way to come at science, and leaves me wondering if anyone actually finds that valuable. Personally, I would rather you just explain the darn thing to me. Instead of being confusing or writing around a concept, just explain it, get it as accurate as you can, and move on. It feels a lot like he’s showing off or trying to preemptively address any criticisms or something. It just throws me off.
Beyond all this though, I do need to praise the book for how it talks about race and genetics. Ridley makes it clear that some genetic sequences are more frequent among different groups, but never talks about anything as being exclusive to one group or that differences among groups are purely genetic. And this is big for a book from the 90s! Heritability is also discussed and how it is not just genetic effects but also how the environment changes things, and there is a whole chapter dedicated to genetic determinism and how that is not a thing. Which, if I was to recommend this book, this would be the big reason. The field has struggled with how to tackle these topics and here Ridley drops all of the literary fluff and presents it simply and does it really well.
I am also just curious how the chapter on prions has changed over time. That chapter is dedicated to genetic mysteries that we still don’t know the answers to, but that means that it probably got out of date almost immediately. I used to know more about prions, back when I was taking intro genetics courses, but now I am very out of the loop.
Anyways so this was a good read, and I might have overlooked
it otherwise for again being rather old. But the parts that were done well
definitely have given me food for thought!
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