Books of Interest
Website: chetyarbrough.blog
“The Genetic Lottery” Why DNA Matters for Social Equality
By: Kathryn Paige Harden
Narrated By: Katherine Fenton
Kathryn Paige Harden (Author, American psychologist and behavioral geneticist, Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.)
“The Genetic Lottery” is an important book that may be easily misinterpreted. Hopefully, this review fairly summarizes its meaning. Fundamentally, Kathryn Paige Harden concludes all human beings are subject to a genetic lottery and the culture in which they mature. It is not suggesting all human beings are equal but that all can develop to their potential as long as he/she has an equal opportunity to become what their genetic inheritance, education, and life’s luck allow.
Harden explains racial identity is a false flag signifying little about human capability.
Every human being is born within a culture and from a mother and father who have contributed genetic DNA they inherited from previous generations. DNA carries genetic instructions for development, growth, and reproduction of living organisms. Those instructions are a blueprint for an organism’s growth. However, the genetic information passed on to future generations varies with each birth and is subject to a lottery of DNA instructions.
The lottery of genetics extends a multitude of characteristics ranging from intelligence to height to the color of one’s skin.
One may become an Einstein, or a slow-witted dolt. One may be born healthy or destined to die from an incurable disease. The growing understanding of genetics suggests the potential for human intervention to prevent disease, but also the possibility of creating a master race of human beings. That second possibility is a Hitlerian idea that lurks in the background of science and political power. It revolves around the theory of eugenics.
Harden suggests an ameliorating power of eugenics is its potential for offering equal opportunity for all to be the best version of themselves within whatever culture they live.
Putting aside the potential of human genetic theory’s risk, Harden explains every human is born within a culture that reflects the genetic inheritance of the continent on which they are born. The combination of the human genetic lottery and the culture in which humans live create ethnic identity and difference. Differences are the strengths and weaknesses of society. Strengths are in the diversity of culture that adds interest and dimension to life. The weakness of society is its tendency to look at someone who is different as a threat or obstacle to a native’s ambition or cultural identity.
Harden suggests every human being’s genetic code should be identified to aid human development by creating an environmental support system that capitalizes on genetic strengths and minimizes weaknesses.
This idealistic view of genetics is fraught with a risk to human freedom of thought and action. Science is generations away from understanding genetics and its relationship to the weaknesses and strengths of human thought and action. Understanding what gave Einstein a genetic inheritance that could see and understand E=MC squared is not known and may never be known. The luck of genetic inheritance and the lottery of life experiences are unlikely to ever be predictable. One interesting note in the forensic examination of Einsteins brain (recorded in another book) is that he had a higher-than-normal gilia cell ratio, non-normal folding patterns in his parietal lobe, and a missing furrow in the parietal lobe that may have allowed better connectivity between brain regions.
The threat of eugenic determinism and the fickle political nature of human beings outweighs the benefits of Harden’s idea of choosing what is best for society.
REVIEWS AND VIEWS OF LIFE 
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