THE SOCIAL GENOME/ CONLEY
THE SOCIAL GENOME
THE NEW SCIENCE OF NATURE AND NURTURE
by Dalton Conley ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025
The latest on nature versus nurture may unsettle readers at the extremes but will entertain them all.
Figuring out who we are—and who we will become.
Belief in the superiority of people like you can be deeply satisfying. Nazism gave that a bad reputation, but it revived with the 1994 bestseller The Bell Curve, whose authors maintained that people achieve if they inherit abilities that nonachievers and minorities lack. Princeton University professor Conley, author of You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist, delivers a compelling update on the steady stream of books that have disproved The Bell Curve’s science, although its thesis remains popular. Philosophers for millennia have maintained that humans are born a blank slate—devoid of knowledge—so everything we know comes from experience: nurture. Charles Darwin complicated matters by contending that natural selection fixed many traits at birth. It’s complicated; readers must pay attention as the author, a “biosociologist” who measures people’s genes as well as their environment, explains concepts such as a polygenic index and passive gene-environmental correlation, but the rewards are substantial. “Today,” Conley writes, “we can predict a US child’s (or embryo’s) adult height, how far he or she will go in school, and whether that child will be overweight as an adult—all from a cheek swab, finger prick, or vial of saliva.” As usual, common sense is wrong. Few doubt that parents exert the dominant influence on how children turn out. Genetic analysis reduces this to 10% or less. Bachelor’s degree holders, over a lifetime, earn $1.5 million more than high school graduates and live 6 to 10 years longer. But they also come from wealthier families with more two-parent households and more educated parents. “Blank-slaters won’t like the fact that even the effects of the environment are partly driven by genes. Hereditarians, on the other hand, won’t appreciate that genes aren’t deterministic but part of a messy social process.” Your environment affects how your genes play out.The latest on nature versus nurture may unsettle readers at the extremes but will entertain them all.
Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781324092636
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Categories:
CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES
Share your opinion of this book
More by Dalton Conley
- BOOK REVIEW
- BOOK REVIEW
- BOOK REVIEW
Awards & Accolades
Likes
- 21
Our Verdict
- GET IT
- New York Times Bestseller
ABUNDANCE
by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Categories:
CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ezra Klein
- BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
- PERSPECTIVES
A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone’s interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this “people’s history”: “it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of resistance.” So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn’s amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn’s case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
Categories:
GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | UNITED STATES | POLITICS | HISTORY
Share your opinion of this book
More by Rebecca Stefoff
- BOOK REVIEW
- BOOK REVIEW
- BOOK REVIEW
BOOK LIST20 Most Addictive Books of 2025 (So Far)
ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS
by Omar El Akkad ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 25, 2025
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
Categories:
CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | WORLD | POLITICS
Share your opinion of this book
More by Omar El Akkad
- BOOK REVIEW
- BOOK REVIEW
BOOK LIST20 Most Addictive Books of 2025 (So Far)
Awards & Accolades
Likes
- 23
Our Verdict
- GET IT
- Kirkus Reviews’
Best Books Of 2020
BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY
From the Pocket Change Collective series
by Alok Vaid-Menon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author’s turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)
Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories:
TEENS & YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
Share your opinion of this book
More In The Series
- BLACK INTERNET EFFECTby Shavone Charles ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
- SKATE FOR YOUR LIFEby Leo Baker ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
This website uses cookies to enhance user experience and to analyze performance and traffic on our website. Learn more