num_pages: 326
description: “Bracingly intelligent, lucid, balanced—witty, too. . . . A scrupulous and charming look at our modern understanding of genes and experience.” — Oliver Sacks Armed with extraordinary new discoveries about our genes, acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley turns his attention to the nature-versus-nurture debate in a thoughtful book about the roots of human behavior. Ridley recounts the hundred years' war between the partisans of nature and nurture to explain how this paradoxical creature, the human being, can be simultaneously free-willed and motivated by instinct and culture. With the decoding of the human genome, we now know that genes not only predetermine the broad structure of the brain, they also absorb formative experiences, react to social cues, and even run memory. They are consequences as well as causes of the will.
language: English
title: The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture
titlecomplete: The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture
genres: Biology, Genetics, Philosophy, Science, Psychology, Evolution, Nonfiction, History, Anthropology, Popular Science
ratings_count: 4119
publisher: Harper Perennial