The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture – Free Will, the Human Genome, and Behavior

“Bracingly intelligent, lucid, balanced—witty, too. . . . A scrupulous and charming look at our modern understanding of genes and experience.” — Oliver Sacks

Armed with extraordinary new discoveries about our genes, acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley turns his attention to the nature-versus-nurture debate in a thoughtful book about the roots of human behavior.

Ridley recounts the hundred years' war between the partisans of nature and nurture to explain how this paradoxical creature, the human being, can be simultaneously free-willed and motivated by instinct and culture. With the decoding of the human genome, we now know that genes not only predetermine the broad structure of the brain, they also absorb formative experiences, react to social cues, and even run memory. They are consequences as well as causes of the will.

How does this new science of genes and environment reshape our understanding of free will, instinct, and what it means to be human?

• Genes Respond to Experience: Discover how genes are not just static blueprints but are designed to absorb formative experiences, react to social cues, and build our brains in response to the world.
• The Myth of the Blank Slate: Explore the hundred years' war between the partisans of nature and nurture, and why the idea of a mind molded entirely by society is a scientific dead end.
• Free Will in a Genetic World: Unravel the paradox of how human beings can be simultaneously motivated by instinct and culture, and how understanding our genes reinforces rather than removes our freedom.
• What Twin Studies Reveal: Delve into the surprising evidence from identical twins that shows how heredity shapes our personalities, and why the family you grow up in has less effect than you think.

Matt Ridley’s books―including The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works, and most recently, Viral: the Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (with Alina Chan)―have sold over a million copies, been translated into thirty-one languages, and won awards. He was a member of the House of Lords from 2013 to 2021 and was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He created the “Mind and Matter” column in The Wall Street Journal in 2010 and was a columnist for The Times. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ridley lives in Northumberland, UK.