Nature Via Nurture
Genes, Experience and What Makes Us Human
Matt Ridley
For Jim
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE The paragon of animals
CHAPTER TWO A plethora of instincts
CHAPTER THREE A convenient jingle
CHAPTER FOUR The madness of causes
CHAPTER FIVE Genes in the fourth dimension
CHAPTER SEVEN Learning lessons
CHAPTER EIGHT Conundrums of culture
CHAPTER NINE The seven meanings of ‘gene’
CHAPTER TEN A budget of paradoxical morals
EPILOGUE Homo stramineus – the straw man
Perverse Mankind! Whose wills, created free,
Charge all their woes on absolute Decree;
All to the dooming Gods their guilt translate,
And follies are miscall’d the crimes of Fate.
Homer’s Odyssey, translated by Alexander Pope1
‘Revealed: the secret of human behaviour,’ read the banner headline in the British Sunday newspaper the Observer on 11 February 2001. ‘Environment, not genes, key to our acts.’ The source of the story was Craig Venter, the self-made man of genes who had built a private company to read the full sequence of the human genome (his own) in competition with an international consortium funded by taxes and charities. That sequence – a string of three billion letters composed in a four-letter alphabet containing the complete recipe for building and running a human body – was to be published later in the week. The first analysis had revealed that there were just 30,000 genes in the human genome, not the 100,000 that many had been estimating up until a few months before.
Details had already been circulated to journalists under embargo. But Venter spilt the story at an open meeting in Lyons on 9 February. Robin McKie of the Observer was in the audience and recognised at once that the 30,000 figure was now public. He went up to Venter and asked him if he realised that this broke the embargo; he did. Not for the first time in the increasingly bitter rivalry over the genome project, Venter’s version of the story would hit the headlines before that of his rivals. ‘We simply do not have enough genes for this idea of biological determinism to be right,’ Venter said to McKie. The wonderful diversity of the human species is not hard-wired in our genetic code. Our environments are critical.’2
Seeing the Observer’s first edition, other newspapers followed suit. ‘Genome discovery shocks scientists: genetic blueprint contains far fewer genes than thought – DNA’s importance downplayed,’ proclaimed the San Francisco Chronicle later that Sunday.3
