Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery Of Inheritance, by Richard C. Francis

On page 32, at the very beginning of chapter four (“The Well-Socialized Gene”), the author begins his chapter this way: “The effort to secure funding for a Vietnam War Memorial was inspired in part by a movie, The Deer Hunter. The result, despite the heated opposition of socially conservative philistines,” which is beyond stupid as a way to begin a chapter. It appears, judging from the productions of many contemporary authors, as if one of the fundamental aspects of an author’s task has been forgotten, and that is seeing the reader as a potential friend. A good writer is one who recognizes that people of all kinds of political positions and backgrounds and perspectives and seeks to build a bridge to people regardless of where they are at in order to appreciate what the author has to say. A great author actively wins over the reader and flatters them into thinking that the writer is on their side and that their ability to understand what the writer has to say put them above the ordinary reader of books. Why it is that contemporary readers have ceased to be able to build bridges to their readers and instead go out of their way to gratuitously insult them is puzzling and irritating to me. This book could have been a very good book, but it is harmed by the author’s instinctive and moronic instinct to score political points at the cost of alienating tens of millions of potential readers.

This book is a bit more than 150 pages of material divided into eleven chapters. The book begins with a short preface that describes what genes are wearing that allows them to be either suppressed or expressed more easily. This is followed by a chapter that discusses the effect of starving Dutch women during World War II on the height and general health of their grandchildren (1). After this, the author discusses the view of genetics that views genes as directors with the rest of the cell being limited to mere actors or stagehands, which the author considers to be an inadequate representation of reality (2). After that there is a generally entertaining chapter on the travails of Jose Canseco (3), whose use of steroids demonstrates some painful epigenetic insights. The chapter on the well-socialized gene cited above (4) mostly talks about The Deer Hunter and the problem of war-induced PTSD. The changing diet and its consequences among the people of the world fills the next chapter (5), and this is followed by a discussion of twigs, trees, and fruits (6), quite naturally, dealing with epigenetics in monkeys and gorillas. This is followed by a chapter on the insights of Sewall Wright on epigenetics (7), a brief chapter that is followed by a longer one dealing with color blindness and its strange effects on some women (8) that make them even more able than normal to recognize color differences. The epigenetics of cross-breeding are explored through the humble ass and other examples (9), after which the author talks about the benefits of Sea Urchins in revealing epigenetic patterns (10). The last chapter of the book discusses problems faced by Tasmanian devils (11), after which the author closes the book with an epilogue on the two-faced nature of genes, acknowledgements, notes, a bibliography, and an index.

When you strip away the author’s abrasive prose, what remains is a worthwhile book that could have used some strong editing to smooth away its rough edges and make it more palatable to audiences that the author would not tend to appeal to but which could easily have been won over, by a more skillful and less offensive text, to the understanding that creating a world that reduces the amount of trauma and suffering faced by people could be a vastly healthier and better-adjusted world that would be safer and more pleasant for all of us to live in. In general, the author’s examples are well-chosen to present a broad and emerging understanding of the influence that experiences of people have on gene expression or suppression, and present a complex view of the way that genes respond to the conditions of the world and are only part of a larger picture in life, and that the genetic code, as it is often called, is not quite the authoritative figure that it has sometimes been made out to be in neo-Darwinian writings. Unfortunately, despite the author’s ambitions, his poor execution makes him an unsuitable person in bringing to an appreciative audience the insights of epigenetics because he cannot see enough of the potential audience for such a work as could yet be written about the field. Perhaps more able and less inflammatory authors could be persuaded to take up the task of explaining the insights of epigenetics to potential readers.