Title:
Living with Our Genes
Author:
Dean Hamer & Peter Copeland
Publisher:
Doubleday, 1998
ISBN
0-385-48583-2

Dean Hamer has been busy on the talkshow circuit these days. In fact, that is where I first heard about his book. Hamer was to me a study in contradictions when I heard him. On the one hand he is quietly insistent that our genes determine very much who we are. On the other hand he takes great pains to point out in every interview that our genes are not our destiny.

To me the distinction is clear, and I puzzled somewhat why Hamer felt it necessary to belabor this point. Of course, reading Gould's book The Mismeasure of Man provided part of the clue. Biological determinism is not a popular point of view, and even the most modest claims are viewed with suspicion by the members of groups that have in the past suffered the most from this insidious excuse for racism.

Living with Our Genes is a broad collection of instances where research has pointed at a connection between our human nature and the genes that we inherit. Traits from thrill seeking, anxiousness, irritability, and love, to addiction, language, and intelligence are shown to have some root in the genes we inherit from our parents. Hamer and Copeland tell many fascinating detective stories, from the initial suspicions pointed at by hunches, confirmed by statistics, and sometimes to the final uncovering of one or more solid connections to our biology.

The book makes no attempt to explain the painstaking work that is necessary to "sequence" genes, but nevertheless illuminates a picture of incredible complexity that is carried by our chromosomes.

When I got to the book's chapter on anger, and read a passage describing how an angry mob disrupted a meeting of behavioral geneticists, the authors' motivations seemed to become clearer. Geneticists are caught in the unenviable position of needing the publicity of the media to gain support for their work. But the work that they do is complex, so the story that the media publish often distorts singular claims, sometimes rendering the information next to worthless.

This was also clear from the questions Hamer had to answer again and again. No interviewer seemed to be satisfied with the notion that genes do determine our general makeup, without bringing biological determinism into the equation. The book explains in more specific terms what no ten second sound bite or even a ten minute interview can.

A human being is an incredibly complicated organism, whose makeup is determined by the intricate interactions of over 100 thousand genes switching on and off during the course of a lifetime. Not only do these genes interact with each other, but their behavior is influenced by the organism's environment. While we can point at a gene as responsible for one or another specific part of the organism's function, we can never predict how a particular individual will make use of it.