‘She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity—A Review
3rd July 2018
Greg Cochran reviews an important new genetics book.
In this book, Carl Zimmer tries to lay out how our ideas and knowledge of genetics have developed over time, and where we are today. He mixes in discussion of the social impact of these ideas. Some of those discussions are reasonable, some are not.
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Before I go any further – Zimmer is wordy. He has things to say, but he never uses one word when ten will do. The facts are always part of some long-winded human-interest story. If you like that sort of thing, you may like this book. I cannot say that I did.
The real problem with this book is that, to Zimmer and many other people, genetics itself is the enemy. The facts, not the discipline, particularly in how they apply to humans. We now know that everything is heritable, to varying degrees — and the more that life is determined or influenced by genetics, the less blank the slate, the less that can be accomplished by egalitarian social policies (or by aristocratic social policies, for that matter). The facts of genetics are caltrops on the road to a ‘just’ society. Zimmer is moderately fair-minded, usually mentioning both criticism of genetic claims and the response to that criticism — but he still gives the impression of wishing these claims had never been made and dislikes scientists who discovered unpleasant truths.
The sad thing about modern science writing is that people don’t feel free to say what they want to say without a lot of tedious SJW base-touching and virtue-signalling, even when it’s not really relevant. Judges often speak of the ‘chilling effect’ of various infringements on Constitutional rights; but that’s nothing compared to the ‘chilling effect’ of the proglodyte cultural miasma we all wade through on actual useful intellectual endeavors.