The Best Science Books of 2016
6.
THE GENE
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“This is the entire essence of life: Who are
you? What are you?”young Leo Tolstoy wrote
in his diary. For Tolstoy, this was a philosophical
inquiry — or a metaphysical one, as it would have been called in his day. But
between his time and ours, science has unraveled the inescapable physical
dimensions of this elemental question, rendering the already disorienting
attempt at an answer all the more complex and confounding.
In The
Gene: An Intimate History (public
library), physician and Pulitzer-winning
author Siddhartha Mukherjee offers a rigorously researched,
beautifully written detective story about the genetic components of what we
experience as the self, rooted in Mukherjee’s own painful family history of
mental illness and radiating a larger inquiry into how genetics illuminates the
future of our species.
Mukherjee writes:
Three profoundly destabilizing
scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into
three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene. Each is foreshadowed by an
earlier century, but dazzles into full prominence in the twentieth. Each begins
its life as a rather abstract scientific concept, but grows to invade multiple
human discourses — thereby transforming culture, society, politics, and
language. But the most crucial parallel between the three ideas, by far, is
conceptual: each represents the irreducible unit — the building block, the
basic organizational unit — of a larger whole: the atom, of matter; the byte
(or “bit”), of digitized information; the gene, of heredity and biological
information.
Why
does this property — being the least divisible unit of a larger form — imbue
these particular ideas with such potency and force? The simple answer is that
matter, information, and biology are inherently hierarchically organized:
understanding that smallest part is crucial to understanding the whole.
Among the book’s most fascinating threads is
Mukherjee’s nuanced, necessary discussion of intelligence
and the dark side of IQ.
Brain Pickings
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