Malcolm in the middle
With this insistence on the importance of environmental factors as shapers of our lives, Gladwell is bucking a deplorable recent trend in science. Over the past few decades, fields such as evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics have tipped the scales toward the nature side of the nature-nurture debate, implying that innate factors largely determine our personalities and talents, and hence our destiny. I call this line of reasoning “gene-whiz science.”
One notorious example of gene-whiz science is the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve, in which Harvard scholars Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein asserted that blacks are innately less intelligent than whites. James Watson, the Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the double helix, reiterated this persistent claim a year ago, as did Slate’s own William Saletan.
Well, you know what they say…
I work as an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (although this site and its content are my own).
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it. I am interested in the relevant technologies and especially the attendant privacy and other ethical/legal/social issues.
This blog may also discuss some of my non-genome interests or, to paraphrase Dwight Yoakam, "Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, etc etc."
The header image comes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's multimedia performance piece, "Ferocious Beauty: Genome."
November 25th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
So, who is that playing the guitar next to Mick Jaggar?
November 25th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
I think it’s Dave Stewart of Eurhythmics fame.