Steven Pinker and the mapping of the human genome

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.