I just received an e-mail from the Personal Genome Project. They are finally ready to expand to a larger number of volunteers. I hope I’ll be among the next set of volunteers accepted into the program. Anyone interested in volunteering themselves should go to the Personal Genome Project website and register.
Bryan Caplan recently put up a great post describing the take away lessons he thinks behavioral genetics offers to parents and singles:
The practical lesson of behavioral genetics for parents, in my view, is to stop trying so hard to change your kids. The practical lesson of Rowe’s evidence for singles, in contrast, seems to be that you should hold out for a very close match. Once you accept that the person you marry is unlikely to “grow into” in the changes that you urge upon him or her, the sensible response is to rely more heavily on the power of selection.1
One of the most remarkable observations from twins studies is that the role of genetics in shaping many traits grows with time rather than diminishes. I have always been fascinated by this: thinking about it now, as I am reading J. Settle, C. T. Dawes and J. H. Fowler’s paper, “The Heritability of Partisan Attachment”, I suddenly recalled the passage from Pindar that Nietzsche was so fond of quoting, in which each of us is urged to “become who you are.” The idea has always seemed quintessentially poetic to me: a phrase plainly self-contradictory used to express an idea that cannot be readily composed out of the concepts we keep on hand.
If we can become who we are, then there must be, for each of us, a true self that we come to resemble more closely over time, much as a sculpture is revealed by a craftsman’s long work on a generic block of marble.
But such an idea requires that, at at every moment, we are not our true selves, but only an approximation of the being we would be if we lived forever. We would have to be merely the shadow of our own Emersonian genius.
This is an enormously strange concept. What are we if we are not ourselves? And how can a self exist if it is not embodied in the world as a living person?
Steven Pinker has given us all yet another reason to think highly of him:
he’s one of ten people who’ve put their entire genome online in an attempt to push science forward amid growing fears about personal privacy and genetic discrimination.
I, for one, am tempted to join the cause — whatever the risks may yet prove to be. I really must have listened to too much Black Flag as a kid.