I quite enjoy Matt Ridley’s work, and he has come out with a new book, Nature via Nuture, that he discusses in The Genome Changes Everything:
For the first time in four billion years a species on this planet has read its own recipe, or is in the process of reading its own recipe. That seems to me to be an epochal moment, because we’re going to get depths of insight into the nature of human nature that we never could have imagined, and that will dwarf anything that philosophers and indeed scientists have managed to produce in the last two millennia. That’s not to denigrate what’s gone before, but the genome changes everything. We know that just because the first one or two glimpses inside this box, the first lifting of the lid of the human genome, reveals to us enormous insights into what’s going on, and just from the first few genes we’re looking at.
What does he mean by Nature via Nurture?
The substance of what I’m interested in is that it’s the genes that are related to behavior, and how they work. The big insight is that genes are the agents of nurture as well as nature. Experience is a huge part of a developing human brain, the human mind, and a human organism. We need to develop in a social world and get things in from the outside. It’s enormously important to the development of human nature. You can’t describe human nature without it. But that process is itself genetic, in the sense that there are genes in there designed to get the experience out of the world and into the organism. In the human case you’re going to have genes that set up systems for learning that are not going to be present in other animals, language being the classic example. Language is something that in every sense is a genetic instinct. There’s no question that human beings, unless they’re unlucky and have a genetic mutation, inherit a capacity for learning language. That capacity is simply not inherited in anything like the same degree by a chimpanzee or a dolphin or any other creature. But you don’t inherit the language; you inherit the capacity for learning the language from the environment.