BOOK SPECIAL.... The Greatest Science Books of 2016 6.THE GENE

The Greatest Science Books of 2016

6.THE GENE

“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