The Selfish Gene

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Evolution snaps into focus when you stop watching the animal and start watching the gene. A body, whether yours or a bee’s or a fig tree’s, is a temporary vehicle DNA builds to copy itself forward. From that vantage point, the fundamental unit of natural selection isn’t the organism or the group but the gene, a stretch of DNA whose only “goal,” in the coldest mechanical sense, is to replicate. We exist because our genes assembled bodies good enough to survive and reproduce. As Dawkins puts it, “We are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” Even death fits: Dawkins suspects we age and die because harmful genes switch on only after we’re past reproducing, beyond the reach of selection.

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, six of the twelve Galvin children — all of them boys — developed schizophrenia. That single, staggering fact turned an ordinary Colorado family into one of the most important case studies in the history of mental illness. Robert Kolker tells two stories at once: how the Galvins’ shared DNA helped drag schizophrenia research away from decades of mother-blaming folklore and toward genetics and brain science, and how the healthy children paid for that contribution with childhoods and adult lives shaped entirely by the illness around them.

Genetics on SummaryShelf

The Selfish Gene

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family