Today the New York Times Book Review published its advance online version of my review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance. (It will appear in print this Sunday.) Others have already reviewed this book elsewhere, with particularly sharp takes coming from Jennifer Raff, Eric Johnson, Michael Eisen, H. Allen Orr, Jerry Coyne, and, also at the Times, Arthur Allen. You’ll find a fuller […]
Continue reading →Humans are hard-wired not to be hard-wired. That phrase, drawn from Ken Weiss, is perhaps the simplest of the many ways that Patrick Clarkin tries to convey, in his wonderful post “Developmental Plasticity and the ‘Hard-Wired’ Problem,” how thoroughly entwined are genetics and experience in shaping and constantly reshaping any organism. It’s silly, in a way, to […]
Continue reading →In his fine short Leonardo da Vinci: A Life, for Penguin’s Penguin Lives series, Sherwin Nuland wonders if there are times when good scientists or entire disciplines, psychology among them, sound idiotic in their speculations because the empirical underpinnings of their fields are simply not yet in place. [Leonardo] has been criticized, now and in […]
Continue reading →This morning Aeon published a revised version of my story “Die, Selfish Gene, Die,” which originally ran last Tuesday. The title is the same, the subtitle altered: Die, selfish gene, die For decades, the selfish gene metaphor let us view evolution with new clarity. Is it now blinding us? In the original (as in the […]
Continue reading →Below is a corrective comment I left below Jerry Coyne’s second of two posts (his first is here) critiquing “Die, Selfish Gene, Die,” my recent article in Aeon about complaints from some biologists that the “Selfish Gene” framing of genetics and evolution was hindering both public and scientific understanding of genetics and evolution. This is rather a tempest […]
Continue reading →The company announced today that in reaction to the FDA’s order to marketing health-related information based on its genetic testing, it will cease providing that information to anyone who signed on after the FDA sent its letter on November 22, 2013. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–23andMe Inc., the leading personal genetics company, today announced that it […]
Continue reading →Many have liked “Die, Selfish Gene, Die,” my Aeon piece challenging Richard Dawkins “Selfish Gene” meme. Quite a few readers have objected to and disagreed with the story, sometimes sharply. Some readers have both liked it and objected to it. At least one objected both rudely and inaccurately; I answer that here. I want to thank everyone who’s read […]
Continue reading →One of the key issues in the dust-up over the FDA’s insistence on regulating 23andMe’s service is the question of how 23andMe’s health-risk results differ from other forms of health-risk information. Today, geneticist Joe Pickrell offers a sharp post that unpacks this a bit. He asks Should the FDA regulate the interpretation of traditional epidemiology? It’s a damned good question. Many online […]
Continue reading →Below find my ever-growing annotated collection of online responses to the FDA’s recent shot across the bow of 23andMe, the consumer genetics company. Until today, I was adding these links to the bottom of my own first reaction to the FDA’s stern letter. (I published my broader, more studied take, How 23andMe Broke the Rules: The F.D.A. […]
Continue reading →Here’s a particularly sharp, context-rich post on that question from from Margaret Curnutte, currently of Baylor University. It seems one of the more deeply informed takes on this fracas. A couple of the key points: On what 23andMe was offering: From its inception, [23andMe] has treaded a fine line between claiming to provide something that […]
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