Genes need to be switched on in order to work.This made me question how often I should wash my hands.Written in 1999, it’s likely outdated in 2022, but I still learnt a lot about biology, genetics, evolution and heredity and changed much of my thinking. Genome is, in my opinion, Matt Ridley’s best book. Human behaviour is unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.People get their personalities from their genes and from their peers, not from their parents.

Children probably have more non-genetic effect on parents than vice versa.

Down-syndrome babies are generally born to older mothers.How many lives could be saved, and early heart attacks averted, by simple genetic diagnosis to identify those at risk and target treatment at them? Heart disease is a preventable and treatable condition.The genes can be induced to change by voluntary, free-willed, conscious action.Your brain chemistry is determined by the social signals to which you are exposed.You can alter your serotonin levels by altering your eating habits.Testosterone is just as good at suppressing the immune system as cortisol.Cortisol levels rise in response not to the amount of work you do, but to the degree to which you are ordered about by other people.The main purpose of most genes in the human genome is regulating the expression of other genes in the genome.Sexual selection is thus an expression of sexual antagonism between genes for seduction and genes for resistance.You select the environments that suit your innate tendencies. As you grow up, you gradually express your own innate intelligence and leave behind the influences stamped on you by others.Heritability does not mean immutability.Simplicity piled upon simplicity creates complexity.More damage has been done by false negatives than by false positives.Our immune systems are set up in such a way that they ‘expect’ to be educated by soil mycobacteria early in childhood when they are not, the result is an unbalanced system prone to allergy.Pleiotropy: a technical term for multiple effects of multiple genes.Anticipation means that the longer the repetition, the longer it is likely to grow when copied for the next generation.The main purpose of genes is to store the recipe for making proteins.Natural selection is simply the process by which life-forms change to suit the myriad opportunities afforded by the physical environment and by other life-forms. Evolution has no pinnacle and there is no such thing as evolutionary progress.There are none so blind as do not wish to see.A great entry point into the human genome, how it works and what genes do (and don’t do).

Genome by matt ridley