“The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment”, Richard Lewontin

What a lovely philosophical book!

Instead of blindly following ways of thinking inherited from generations of other scientists, Lewontin rethinks evolution and development.

This is science criticism, but not in a sweeping, bitter way. Rather, it is subtle criticism of details that have a great effect on how we think about established dogmas like “DNA makes proteins” and “organisms adapt to fit their environments”.

The three main parts of this book discuss how the trinity of genes, organism and environment all act as cause and effect in relation to each other.

This is a warning to Mind Your Metaphors, and not let human perception alter the questions we ask of science (as, for example, in the issue with the evolution of the chin) and then fit the answers we receive into categories we can understand.

“It is easy to be a critic”, Lewontin says, but he does it so well! His arguments are extremely well structured and when he explains how physical signals of the outside world determine the life of an organism “like shadows on the wall, passed through a transforming medium of its own creation”, it is logical as well as poetic.

He talks about some cool quirks of evolution, like this one:

“The time between the origin of a species and the time that a mutation of just the right sort occurs and reaches a high enough frequency to be significant in the selective process is of the same order as the total lifetime of the species”, so that most possibly beneficial mutations are never seen.

We shouldn’t ask what a certain feature is “good for” and instead realise that often it is due to the meandering nature of evolutionary progress.

The style of writing is quite personal, despite the abstract topics, and asides like the philosophical musings about avoiding maybe a few but never all causes of death make this a really enjoyable book, that I felt good for reading.

Even if I don’t know if I personally can take on his advice and practise better science for it, Lewontin makes that seem desirable.

“Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code”, Matt Ridley

I enjoyed this book immensely! Biographies of brilliant people might be a completely untapped source of reading pleasure for me. Surely, a lot of it is due to Ridley’s easy style and entertaining anecdotes; I have only read his “Genome” and can’t remember how I felt about it, but I’ll definitely read more of his works in the future.

But what I loved the most was finding out about this astonishing man, who I always thought had stood in Watson’s shadow, which was apparently not the case at all.

I was so enamoured with Crick by half-way through the book that I was totally shocked by the revelations about his radical views (at least he held them in the 1960s and 70s) on races, eugenics and sterilisation of “genetically inferior” people. I don’t know what to do with this information and it seems like neither did Ridley. It is mentioned dutifully but the author doesn’t really take a position and maybe that is not the job of a biographer. As I uneasily read on about this man with the incredible imagination, admiration gained the upper hand again and by the end I cried when he dies.

The fact that Crick was a raging (yes!) atheist helped, of course, but the main reason for liking him is expressed in this last sentence of the epilogue: “He would have liked to find the seat of consciousness and to see the retreat of religion. He had to settle for explaining life.”

“Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body”, Armand Marie Leroi

I read this initially because we invited the author to speak at the GenSoc Darwin Day Symposium 2006 and I wanted to be prepared. But it turned out to be really fascinating in the way that deformities are fascinating. The book features a lot of pictures, drawings and photos of mutants, but they are not even needed to keep the reader hooked. It’s well written in an intentionally dramatic style ( “Cleopatra ordered the dissection of pregnant slave girls so that she could observe the progress of their embryos. While we may admire her curiosity and ability to fit laboratory work into a busy social schedule, we can hardly follow her lead. We must approach the human body more circumspectly. We must find mutants.” ), which serves the slightly circus-like topic of the book well.

From a scientific perspective it is a very good overview of embryogenesis, Hox genes, the history of science and even human nature in dealing with “monstrosities”.

The last two chapters, however, seem like an afterthought, as if he’d covered the main themes and then remembered “I’m also interested in ageing and race!”. Those topics are also well dealt with and interesting, the style just changes to a more familiar genetics popular science book.

He is not intimidated by over-cautious ethical concerns and speaks honestly about his views of human race and brings home the message that studying inter-continental genetic variation does not make a scientist a racist.

Leroi does not try to patronise his readers by over-simplifying his explanations and this means that it is not the easiest read and is probably not intended for lay people. His use of foreign language expression is a little excessive but gives his writing a personal style.

Reading “Mutants” makes me wonder if it is advisable to have children at all for fear of the large number of things that can go wrong in their development. But then again, as Leroi puts it in his introduction: “We are all mutants. But some of us are more mutant than others.”