"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.