Nature via nurture is a demanding book. In parts it is harrowingly complex and, although at other times it is reasonably accessible, it could never quite be grouped with bestseller-list populist science. Research into genetics is an academic pursuit on a par with rocket science and, although Matt Ridley does his best to convey to the layman what it is all about, it's not for nothing that the Nobel Prize is won by an exceptional few from a very short list.
The first part of Ridley's central premise is one that few nowadays, creationists aside, really dispute. It is that the old nature versus nurture debate is dead. Nativists used to believe that it was an individual's genes that exclusively defined them, and empiricists believed that human beings were moulded solely by the environment. It is now becoming increasingly accepted science that both nature and nurture act in tandem. However Ridley goes further than that, claiming that genes learn from the environment ? and in many cases need outside influences to fire instinct. Nature uses nurture. Of course despite this being, on the surface, pretty straightforward, it is still theorising at the frontier of highly nebulous physical and behavioural science, and he has to prove his hypothesis. At length. That's the problem with science. The discovery is the brilliant climax to a lot of very boring foreplay.
To help his theory, Ridley uses the conceit of a photograph of "twelve hairy men", the crucial explorers in the development of our understanding of genes and experience. The photograph is a composite (not all pictured in it were alive at the time) and includes Darwin, Mendel, Galton and Pavlov. The bulk of the book deals with all of them and how they were all a little bit right and a little bit wrong, and how together they built up an evidentiary patchwork that forms the foundations of modern genetics.
At times this is a fascinating pilgrimage. Along the way we meet characters such as Denisovich Lysenko, a man who encouraged Stalin towards the purges of geneticists in the Soviet Union, and John B Watson. "He was a violent adolescent, a faithless husband and a domineering father who drove a son to suicide and a granddaughter to drink, before becoming a bitter recluse. He also caused a revolution in the study of human behaviour." The journey draws in Nazism, incest, schizophrenia and Utopia. These passages are the colourful antidote to the science that can, if you are not blessed with singular concentration, become numbing after a while.
That's not to say that the intricate explanations of scientific experiments are uniformly dull. They can be mind-blowing. Consider this experiment by Josh Dubnau and Tim Tully: "First, they made a temperature-sensitive mutation in a particular fly gene, called shibire, the gene for a motor protein called dynamin. This means that at 30C the fly is paralysed, but at 20C it recovers completely." They also perform a similar experiment where they can make a fly form memories at certain temperatures but not at others. Elsewhere, the author tells us that scientists have discovered that a slight change in the 192nd letter of a 1,335 letter chunk of DNA sat on Chromosone 11 will make an individual "strikingly" more neurotic.
However, sometimes Ridley misjudges it. He gets too deeply into his subject and further obscures thinking that is already close to impenetrable: "Though in theory it makes teleological nonsense to talk of a stomach having its own purpose, since the stomach has no mind, in practice it makes perfect sense so long as you engage the grammatical equivalent of four wheel drive, the passive voice: stomachs have been selected to appear as if equipped with purposeful design."
To be fair, the fact that the book regularly gets mired down is rarely the fault of Ridley's writing. Mostly he avoids plunging into dense paragraphs such as the one above. It's just that a lot of dense work has to be waded through, evidence has to be demonstrated. If the experiences of his 12 explorers have taught him anything, it is that experimental theory is a frontier easily as hard fought as any battle-line, and any number of scientific gunslingers are waiting to shoot his ideas down. Ridley knows he has to exhaustively defend himself from their inevitable attacks on his conclusions.
One possible problem with the book is that it is difficult at times to understand what the author's intention is. Is it to draw all the strands of previous argument together in a single document and make the argument greater than a sum of its existing parts? Or is he seeing himself as a mirror of these other explorers, wanting to add his own ideas to the pantheon of experimental reasoning and be the 13th man in that picture? His reverence for his subject and its fathers, his elevation of genetics to a pedestal and the inclusion of his own voice within the pages of this book indicate he is battling with his own egocentricity. But on balance, this doesn't really matter, and perhaps it's even necessary. There's a lot of skill here. This is a book with real wisdom.
