Out of date by now, but still a good introduction and excellent bit-by-bit bathroom reading. ;-)

worth consuming… with the caveat that, if you know anything about genetics, you are in for something of a disappointment.

An interesting introduction to the sweepingly large subject matter of the human genome, and worth reading to find the chapters which interest you most so that you can go and consume more in-depth books about those.
To be honest I found the format (a chapter per chromosone, looking at a specific gene to be found on that chromosone) trite and forced. Ridley’s obviously passionate about genetics and the place it has to play in modern society, and if you still think of genetic science as some kind of leering Frankensteinian creation, then hopefully Ridley’s book will make you stop and reassess that view. But the truth is, by the last few chapters, I felt that he had simply run out of things to say and was reduced to rhetoric, speculation and unfinished trains of philisophical thought. In particular the final chapter on free will was, in my view, nothing short of farcical.
An interestingly bland introduction, or blandly interesting, rarely giving enough detail to satisfy, and, given the breakneck speed at which genetic science is moving, already showing its age.
Worth reading to whet your appetite, but nothing more.

I think I must have been very tired when I read the first chapter of this all those moons ago, since last night I sat down and gobbled up 6 chapters in one sitting. If anything I found it LACKING in scientific detail. I mean, there’s popular science, then there are books that populise science’s findings without giving away any of its mechanisms.
I think this might fall into the latter category.

Obviously I’ve learned a few general facts, but I was hoping to learn more about the genome itself, how it actually does things, or failing that, things that are so mind bogglingly complex that we don’t have the slightest clue how it does them.

The closest Ridley has got to that so far is an awful lot of “length” comparisons – if the genome were a book, its pages could be piled from here to moon and back no less than 57 times, etc etc. Well yes, but OBVIOUSLY the genome contains a lot of information. It contains everything we are and could potentially be. That’s a lot of things. But it also contains a lot of redundent, repeat information so waxing on and on about its length seem, to me, rather to miss the point. I want to know about the non-redundent inforamtion, and I want to know what it does.

Maybe that will come in later chapters, but I’m not so sure. Each chapter seems to be a rather, dare I say it, shallow introduction to an “aspect” of genetics, without building into more depth anything mentioned in previous chapters. Most of the time it reads more like the history of the discovery of the genome than of the genome itself.
I get the feeling that this book is expressly written for people who have never even looked at a cell under a microscope before; who had never even heard the word “genome” before they saw this book. But maybe that’s simply the book showing its age (published before the publication of the human genome project); maybe it’s just a sign of how, even in the layman, basic understanding of genetics has surpassed all expectations less than 10 years after the books’s first appearance.

Ho hum. We shall see.

In six months I have consumed a dramatic ONE chapter. Further consumption being hampered by sunny weather, kanji study, Daichi, other books, work (yes, I know), sudoku, half-hearted writing of novel, swimming and cross-stitch. Estimated finish date: February 19th 2008.