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Rating: 
Summary: same book as "nature via nurture"
Review: "Buy this book with Nature Via Nurture by Matt Ridley today!" says the Amazon.com page. THEY ARE THE SAME BOOK. I fell for this and bought this one.
The book itself is excellent, but no need to buy it twice!
Rating: 
Summary: Covers a lot of ground
Review: Good book. I must say I liked Genome better, so this one suffers a bit by comparison. But for someone like me, who likes enough depth to understand the particular topic, but is more interested how all those pieces fit togther into a big picture, this book was perfect. And well written too.
If you like James Burke's overviews of human history, or Stephen Jay Gould's "Living Stomes of Marrakech" and want the same approach to the genes, then this book is for you.
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Summary: Great Book - But DON'T BUY IT!!!! (read this review first)
Review: I have really enjoyed each and every Matt Ridley book and "The Agile Gene" is no exception - but for the fact that it is an identical 'word-for-word' copy of his book titled "Nature Via Nurture". I'm not sure why a publisher would release the same book under a different title (there is one very small notice on the left front of the cover stating "Previously published as Nature Via Nurture"), but I'm more upset that it's not a new Matt Ridley book than by being out the money for the price of the book and the special two day delivery.So...great book, just don't shell out any money if you already read "Nature Via Nurture".
Rating:
Summary: Great Book - But DON'T BUY IT!!!! (read this review first)
Review: I have really enjoyed each and every Matt Ridley book and "The Agile Gene" is no exception - but for the fact that it is an identical 'word-for-word' copy of his book titled "Nature Via Nurture". I'm not sure why a publisher would release the same book under a different title (there is one very small notice on the left front of the cover stating "Previously published as Nature Via Nurture"), but I'm more upset that it's not a new Matt Ridley book than by being out the money for the price of the book and the special two day delivery. So...great book, just don't shell out any money if you already read "Nature Via Nurture".
Rating:
Summary: Twisting linguistics [biologically]
Review: Many similes have been used to introduce us to our genome; our DNA. It's a plan. It's a recipe. It's a blueprint. It's a code. Ridley shows how these metaphors miss the point - they're all too fixed to compare with the dynamics of the fundamental molecule of life. He shows how our genome, indeed, the genome common to all life, uses the same elements to say many things. Instead of terms identifying fixed elements, he suggests the image of language. The genome has a limited lexicon of phrases with which to build bodies and personalities, yet manages an immense variation in the results. How like a chimpanzee are you?, he asks. Depending on how you make the comparison - very little or very much. If you count the entire number of "base pairs" making up chimpanzees and humans, the difference is minimal - perhaps 30 thousand out of 3 billion. If, instead, you visit the zoo [or, better, Gombe] the differences are striking.
In Ridley's view, the striking differences are due to "word order" contained in the genome. All the words are essentially the same, but different locations and different interactions produce different characteristics. Including behaviour. In the six or seven million years since the chimpanzee-human line diverged, lifestyles, diet, social structure and living environment have helped guide how the genome produces a body and how that body will likely act in a given situation. Environment and the genome, then, are in a constant interactive flux. They feed signals through the organism to determine whether the organism will survive and reproduce. Nature isn't in the driver's seat, and if we fail to learn or adapt to the vagaries of environment, we won't survive to have descendants. Nature, then, is achieved via nurture.
All this should seem self-evident in today's world, but Ridley shows we have yet to fully understand and accept our role in Nature. There are few writers as articulate and expressive in dealing with these issues as Ridley. His grasp of the science involved is firm, yet he maintains a conversational tone throughout the narrative. While you will encounter much that is new to you in this book, you may close it [the first time], confident that his explanations have neither overwhelmed you nor left you unsatisfied. Of course, as Ridley points out, there is much work remaining in understanding the genome's impact on life. With luck, this book may impel others to follow his lead and uncover more of life's mysteries. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
Rating:
Summary: Experience and Heredity: Separate, Maybe Equal
Review: This is a book-length treatment of a big idea: that the mentality and behavior of human beings throughout their lives involves an intricate and circular interaction of their genes and their experiences. Thus it claims to resolve the nature-nurture debate by meeting in the middle.
Ridley persuades by accumulating examples and evidence that most of what we do and are has a genetic basis, but that that is just the beginning of the story. That basis is only a potential until various genes are waked up (and others put to sleep) because of particular kinds of experiences the person carrying them has that they, the genes, have been "waiting" for. In their turn, then, the genes will cause development or behavior that creates yet more experience that further works on those same or other "expectant" genes. Thus learning to see: early childhood experience is critical, as the baby's brain is sorting out the signals from its eyes, and setting up for binocular vision and the perception of shapes. "Without visual experience in the first months of life, the brain cannot interpret what the eye sees."(p164) And of course everyone knows that one cannot learn to speak a language natively after a certain age. In fact, from conception through senescence our genes are constantly in action, responding to our environments, and developing and running our bodies and minds.
So much research today points to the fact that environment can mold us only in so far as our basic makeup (our genes) allows and facilitates it; at the same time, our genes can control us only through coming to action in different ways depending on our differing experiences. Ridley takes care to make the point that our genes do not work simply during early development, but constantly, throughout our lives.
He has also written a couple other books that each explores a single topic in human evolution: The Red Queen on sex, and The Origins of Virtue on our tendency to think and act as members of a group. In this book, as in those, he has a rather scattershot approach that uses current research in the field under discussion along with more general arguments and wide-ranging contributions from other areas to accumulate evidence toward his particular point. His style is easy to like: it is clear (with occasional muddiness in technical explanation) and colloquial, and is lightly spiced with literary references that pay us the compliment of assuming we are familiar with them.
However, as in The Origins of Virtue, the point he is making is a bit slippery. Certainly, the total of what he has to say does buttress his contention that nature and nurture are both required to build a human, that genes are not destiny any more than environment is destiny (which means that both or either might be in some circumstances, and neither in other circumstances). But this proposition is not so much proved as prostrated by a thousand cuts. Whether or not you come away convinced (and I think you will), you will certainly come away entertained.
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