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‘This is not simply a book of ideas, it is also a book of stories, most astounding, many heartbreaking’ – Bryan Appleyard, SUNDAY TIMES
Since the discovery of DNA, scientists have believed that genes are fixed entities that cannot be changed by environment – we inherit them, pass them on to our children and take them with us when we die.
Professor Tim Spector reveals how the latest genetic research and his own pioneering studies on epigenetics are rewriting everything we thought we knew about genes, identity and evolution. Conceptually, he explains, our genes are not fixed entities but more like plastic, able to change shape and evolve, and these changes can be passed on to future generations.
Tim Spector’s dazzling guide to the hidden world of our genes reveals the complex role they play in shaping our identities, and will make you think again about everything from sexuality to religion, cancer to autism, politics to pubic hair, clones to bacteria, and what it is that makes us all so unique and quintessentially human.
Since the discovery of DNA, scientists have believed that genes are fixed entities that cannot be changed by environment – we inherit them, pass them on to our children and take them with us when we die.
Professor Tim Spector reveals how the latest genetic research and his own pioneering studies on epigenetics are rewriting everything we thought we knew about genes, identity and evolution. Conceptually, he explains, our genes are not fixed entities but more like plastic, able to change shape and evolve, and these changes can be passed on to future generations.
Tim Spector’s dazzling guide to the hidden world of our genes reveals the complex role they play in shaping our identities, and will make you think again about everything from sexuality to religion, cancer to autism, politics to pubic hair, clones to bacteria, and what it is that makes us all so unique and quintessentially human.
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Reviews
It is a complex concept, but Spector drifts easily through difficult scientific explanations, offering lucid, easy-to-follow prose... a provocative read.
It is provocative stuff, but all couched in the fresh and fast-paced style of popular science.
Tim Spector's book turns genetics on its head. Lucid, surprising and with a very human face. It brings epigenetics alive. it is a great read!
Identically Different is a fresh and though-provoking book on how the environment affects epigenetics.
A fascinating and provocative book...Spector is a talented story-teller, weaving real-life accounts of identical twins into each chapter...This is an informative and thought-provoking tour of some of the most exciting areas in biology right now. Spector concludes by inviting us to imagine a future in which we see our genes as malleable, rather than as masters of our biological destiny - just one part of the endlessly complex and fascinating story of what makes each of us unique.
Spector will get you through many dinner parties. But, much more importantly, he will show how a certain kind of scientific fundamentalism collapsed under the burden of its inability to explain the world as it is - complex, flowing, changing - rather than as they would like it to be - simple and clear. Read him.
This science book guides us, via artful storytelling and ground breaking research using identical twins, to reconsider the flexibility and power of our genes.
In Identically Different, Tim Spector, a world-renowned authority on twins, introduces us in an entertaining, eloquent and expert way to the new (yet old) science of epigenetics: the study of how the environment can influence our genes and how those influences can be passed on to future generations.
This book is a fascinating exploration of our current understanding of what makes us what we are: health, behaviour, and personality.