Gene Genie

Abstract

The most controversial aspect of this book is the title. By attempting to tie folk concepts of human differences to commonplaces of genetics research, Wade has conjured up a storm of protest. Indeed, some of the responses to the book have been absurdly over-the-top in terms of scaremongering and threats. So much so, that Scooby Doo and his friends might wonder if the tales of scary monsters were a deliberate attempt to keep meddling kids away from something really interesting down at the disused old fair ground. In respect of this we will merely note that scientific support for folk concepts is no more likely to be forthcoming in genetics than it is in any other field. What interests the readers of this journal are the more interesting questions of what Wade’s book contributes to our understanding of human behavioral sciences. In the first half of the book Wade tries to summarize and synthesize the results of the last ten years of analyzing the human genome. In the second half, he attempts to give grounds for believing something like Fukuyama’s (1989) somewhat Whiggish view of history. We will leave detailed commentary on this latter aspect of his book to others. However, some behavioral parts of this thesis appear premature to us for reasons we will go into below. For a variety of reasons, some of which are interesting and profound, and some merely historical accident, the study of human behavior has been bifurcated. The biology of humans has been commonly understood to be fixed across the species – on the model of computer hardware. Those things that make us different from one another – simplified under the rubric of culture – has been taken to be akin to software. This has been seen as the more flexible aspect. One major (and boring) reason for this two-fold division has been that it’s just methodologically – mainly mathematically--simpler to model human biological data in terms of the neutral theory. On this view, genes mainly just change due to drift without much Darwinian selec