Personal genomics is poised to enter the consumer realm with all the
whiz and bang that citizen media did in 2008. Suddenly, with the help
of companies like Knome and 23andMe,
those on the path to self-knowledge will be able to procure a full or
partial sequence of their genome to unlock the fundamental secrets of
the psyche. Personal genomics will be the ultimate litmus test of why we are the way
we are. There will be no more need to confabulate why you are allergic
to peanuts, close your left eye in bright sun, are woefully obese or got cancer
at 45. It doesn’t just run in the family anymore. It runs in you. You
will point to a long combination of adenine, thymine, guanine, and
cytosine, conveniently folded in your breast pocket or downloaded to
your iPhone, and explain everything to your thoroughly wowed cocktail
party.
Maybe. Since Watson and Crick, geneticists have known genes express
heritable traits that have been handed off to us over generations. How
those traits can be interpreted in the age of personal genomics is
complicated however. Steven Pinker, experimental psychologist at
Harvard, recently submitted himself
to 23andMe for genomic mapping. His results confirmed items he already
knew about himself (above average intelligence, a predilection for walking), raised some potential reasons for worry (26.8 percent chance
for Type 2 diabetes) and imparted some pretty useless errata, like the
average odds for red hair. Pinker’s hair (see below) is a mass of gray.
Pinker notes that, while there is a “horoscopelike fascination of
learning about genes that predict your traits,” the technology for
interpreting our genomes for the public good is not up to scratch.
Rather, most personal genomic technologies scan for common mismatches
in the gene sequence that could cause
a certain result your phenotype. Scanning for missing or repeated DNA
is not part of the package yet. And identifying bumps in the sequence
doesn’t necessarily advance our knowledge if we don’t know how many
bumps, or at what frequency those bumps, cause a certain disease. Even
if you discover you have the precise genetic sequence for obesity, no
doctor can do anything with that information to help you avoid an
untimely death from obesity-related complications. Eating less may
still be the best prognosis, and it costs far less than a $100,000 gene
scan.
Pinker has authored seven books on the nature of the homo sapiens and takes
an evolutionary view to explain the puzzle of our species. When he spoke to Big Think he delved into his primary field of
study, linguistic generativity with a particular focus on the nebula of
irregular verbs. Grammar and language, Pinker argues, are hard-wired into our
brains. When a child learns the word for a certain food, it evokes, like a page
from the original hunter-gatherer lexicon, certain innate concepts. And over
time these concepts imbue the word with a whole family of words and the child's
gustatory vocabulary develops.
But, as
other linguists have argued, one fundamental law of genetics undercuts this
innate acquisition theory: generational variation. Thanks to Watson and Crick,
we know variation occurs in the gene sequence. Thus, there would always be
certain offspring born without entire concepts of language. They would go through
life without the linguistic associations that come with "t-bone
steak" or "Brussels sprouts." But such is not the case. Everyone child
learns a vocabulary of food. Brussels sprouts are "yucky," a t-bone “delicious”
and, unless Pinker's next foray into personal genomics will be to uncover a
DNA-level support for his innate acquisition concept, social influences, more
than evolution, seem to determine why we say what we say. Watch the video above
for more on Pinker’s research.
