Herding Hemingway’s Cats: Understanding How Our Genes Work

But, there’s good news: if there’s anything the past few years have shown us, it’s that genes are not destiny—they merely predict what the Standard American Diet will do to you.

This led her to propose the concept of gene regulation, which challenged the theory of the genome as a static set of instructions passed from one generation to the next. The work McClintock first reported in 1950, the result of projective thinking, extensive research, persistence, and a willingness to suspend disbelief, wasn’t understood or accepte

Recent discoveries in genetics are turning this bad gene vs. good gene model on its head and pointing toward what looks a lot more like the concept of intensifiers. Psychologists call it the “differential susceptibility hypothesis.” The same genes that lead to bad stuff can actually lead to great stuff in a different situation.

As philosopher of science Daniel Nicholson puts it, “The view that genes are the primary causal agents of all the phenomena of organismic life is not well supported by the findings of contemporary biology.” This much, at least, seems uncontroversial. And yet—and yet!—these correlations persist, and genotypic changes and phenotypic changes often tra