The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates The Complexities of Human Thought

In The Birth of the Mind , award-winning cognitive scientist Gary Marcus irrevocably alters the nature vs. nurture debate by linking the findings of the Human Genome project to the development of the brain. Startling findings have recently revealed that the genome is much smaller than we once thought, containing no more than 30,000-40,000 genes. Since this discovery, scientists have struggled to understand how such a tiny number of genes could contain the instructions for building the human brain, arguably the most complex device in the known universe. Synthesizing up-to-the-minute biology with his own original findings on child development, Marcus is the first to resolve this apparent contradiction by chronicling exactly how genes create the infinite complexities of the human mind. Along the way, he dispels the common misconceptions people harbor about genes, and explores the stunning implications of this research for the future of genetic engineering. Vibrantly written and completely accessible to the lay reader, The Birth of the Mind will forever change the way we think about our origins and ourselves.

Gary Marcus is Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University. Author of The Algebraic Mind, Marcus received his Ph.D. from MIT at the age of twenty-three. In 2002-2003, he is a Fellow of the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. He lives in New York City. To learn more about Marcus' work, please visit http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gary/birth.html