A Persian Cafe, Edward Lord Weeks

Thursday 26 May 2016

Burn of the Day

From Stuart Ritchie's review of The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee:

"This disappointing failure to grasp the genetic nettle can be illustrated by a quotation from Mukherjee’s section on IQ tests. ‘Is g [general intelligence] heritable? In a certain sense, yes.’ Alas, the ‘certain sense’ here really means ‘after much qualification’; in fact, after so much qualification that you’ll go away thinking the answer is actually ‘no’, and not worrying too much about it. So, in the same spirit: isThe Gene worth reading? In a certain sense, yes."

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