It Takes a Genome How a Clash Between Our Genes and Modern Life Is Making Us Sick

by Gibson, Greg

• ISBN13: 9780137137466
• ISBN10: 013713746X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-12-24
• Publisher: Ft Pr

Summary

Human beings have astonishing genetic vulnerabilities. More than half of us will die from complex diseases that trace directly to those vulnerabilities, and the modern world we've created places us at unprecedented risk from them. In It Takes a Genome, Dr. Greg Gibson posits a revolutionary new hypothesis: our genome is out of equilibrium, both with itself and its environment. Simply put, our genes and our cultures are at war. Our bodies were never designed to subsist on fat and sugary foods; our immune systems weren't designed for today's clean, bland environments; our minds weren't designed to process hardedged, artificial electronic inputs from dawn 'til midnight. And that's why so many of us suffer from chronic diseases that barely touched our ancestors. Gibson begins by revealing the stunningly complex ways in which multiple genes cooperate and interact to shape our bodies and influence our behaviours. Then, drawing on the very latest science, Gibson explains the genetic 'mismatches' that increasingly lead to cancer, diabetes, inflammatory and infectious diseases, depression, and senility. He concludes with a look at the probable genetic variations in human psychology, sharing the evidence that traits like introversion and agreeableness are grounded in equally complex genetic interactions. Simply put, it demolishes yesterday's stale debates over 'nature vs. nurture,' introducing a new view that is far more intriguing, and far closer to the truth.

Author Biography

Greg Gibson is Professor of Genetics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and of Integrative Biology at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is a leader in the new field of genomics, studying how interactions between genes and the environment affect human health and organismal evolution. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Basel, Switzerland, and did postdoctoral work at Stanford University. He is on the editorial boards of PLoS Genetics, Current Biology, Genetics, and other leading journals, and with Spencer V. Muse, coauthored A Primer of Genome Science, one of the field’s leading textbooks, now in its third edition.

Table of Contents

Preface:How a genetic culture clash with modern life is making us sick	p. ix
The adolescent genome	p. 1
Breast cancerrsquo;s broken genes	p. 19
Not so thrifty diabetes genes	p. 41
Unhealthy hygiene	p. 65
Genetic AIDS	p. 85
Generating depression	p. 99
The alzheimerrsquo;s generation	p. 121
Genetic normality	p. 135
Endnotes	p. 151
About the author	p. 175
Index	p. 177
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Preface Preface How a Genetic Culture Clash with Modern Life is Making Us SickWe humans, I am sure I have little need to convince you, are an extraordinary species. Whether you regard us as the pinnacle of Creation or the latest exemplar of the evolutionary process, our genes endow us with a certain uniqueness. We are capable of great athleticism, artistic genius, bravery, brilliance, creativity, and conscious reflection. No other species has our linguistic dexterity, or the reasoning skills that have led us in a few short millennia to dominate the planet. Yet for all this wonder, we are also astonishingly genetically vulnerable. More than half of us will die of a complex disease whose origins can be traced to genetic susceptibilities that place us at risk in the modern environment of our making.The seeds of our discontent lie hidden in the human genome, uncovered now by a genetic culture clash with contemporary life. It turns out that organisms evolve not just to approach some optimum, but also to be buffered against the vagaries of circumstance. Take any species outside its comfort zone, and all of a sudden it gets a whole lot more vulnerable. In the last few hundred years, humans have created an environment defined by fast and sugary foods and bland immune exposure, while our mental world is shaped more by electronic energy than the soft sensibilities of the biosphere. Is it any wonder that diabetes, asthma, and depression are almost epidemic?The mission of this book is to explain how our genes make us sick. Secondarily, it is to advance the thesis that they do so in large part because the genome is out of equilibrium, with itself and with the environment. If you like, our genes are "not in a happy place." So much has changed so quickly in human history, starting 10,000 generations ago with the origin of the species and accelerating 10 decades ago with the pace of industrialization, that many genetic processes are not quite right. The stress of modernity provides a little extra shove that pushes otherwise perfectly normal varieties of genes to the brink of malfunction. Like a bad casserole, some flavors just don't go together, certainly not with the ingredients they are being paired with. Flavors that throughout primate history have been perfectly innocuous now find themselves singled out as the bad guys, as the risk factors that contribute to obesity and inflamed bowels and kids who can't pay attention.All I ask of you is to suspend some of the beliefs that you may have picked up from the media, or from fundamentalist Darwinians. It is convenient for journalists to write stories about genes for this or for that: genes for aggression and genes for altruism; good genes and selfish genes. But it is the way that genes work together inside cells that influences whether your nose is long or your girth is rotund. Every single gene comes in a variety of types, some common and some more rare, and just about every gene has multiple tasks and responsibilities. The key to understanding why they make us sick is to understand that, just like every one of us, they are just trying to do their best given the features they were endowed with in a complicated world. With the best intentions, sometimes things just don't work outparticularly when we're outside our comfort zone.This book is written from the perspective of an empirical evolutionary quantitative geneticist. A what? This is actually a mainstream branch o