The Reviews response group provides a list of customer reviews, an average rating (1 to 5 stars), and the total number of reviews for each item in the response. Each customer review will contain the rating, summary, date of review, and full review text.
Sample Response (REST)
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<Review>
<ASIN>0060006781</ASIN>
<Rating>4</Rating>
<HelpfulVotes>9</HelpfulVotes>
<TotalVotes>11</TotalVotes>
<Date>2003-06-13</Date>
<Summary>It's in the genes, just not in the way we thought.</Summary>
<Content>There is a review from Richard Dawkins on the back of this book; it starts with, "I would never have expected a book about 'nature or nurture' to be even miidly interesting let alone a real page-turner." In a way, I was sort of with Dawkins on this one. I'm not sure how much gene/environment polarization there is within the science community. Still, I got the book for two reasons. First, I've read Ridley (Origins of Virture, Genome) before. Second, and as Ridley points out in his book, even if there is a lack of gene/environment extremism in science, the laity is still quite polarized when they should not be. <P> Ridley starts by envisiioning photograph of the twelve great men Ridley feels have influenced study on human behavior. They are Charles Darwin (evolution), Francis Galton (first heritability theories), William James (instincts as a part of psychology), DeVries and Mendel (shared discovery of genes), Ivan Pavlov (conditioning theorist), John Watson (behaviorism), Emile Kraeplin (personality as history), Freud (psychoanalysis), Emile Durkheim (founder of sociology), Franz Boaz (studied relations of cultures to one-another), Jean Piaget (studied how children learn) and Konrad Lorenz (discovered the phenomenon of 'imprinting' in instincts). <P> Each chapter loosely starts with discussion of one of these thinkers. Basically, Ridley thinks that within all of these thinkers, there is something like a correct answer. Of course, each thinker got as much wrong as they did right so through tasty anecdotes, statistics and modern research results, Ridley shows us what he thinks each got right and wrong.<P> The only problem I had with this book is that the chapters hop from one to another idea without adequately tying them together. Even the last chapter "a budget of paradoxical morals" extrapolates conclusions that didn't quite seem to represent what I'd read in the book. Each chapter by itself was interesting, but taken as a whole, the book is muddled. Still, not bad for Matt Ridley.</Content>
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<Review>
<ASIN>0060006781</ASIN>
<Rating>5</Rating>
<HelpfulVotes>19</HelpfulVotes>
<TotalVotes>20</TotalVotes>
<Date>2003-09-23</Date>
<Summary>Move beyond false dichotomies with this book</Summary>
<Content>Matt Ridley does exactly that with Nature via Nurture. He shows how "nature vs. nurture" simply is not a scientifically tenable idea. Genetic tendencies, such as imprinting, cannot be manifested without specific environmental influences; environmental influences cannot have an effect without genetic material on which to work.<BR>This book is not, contrary to one other reviewer, hard to follow for anybody with a basic, basic education in heredity or genetics. And it's chock-full of information that will open one's eyes about the field.<BR>Take, for example, the fact that humans have about 30,000 genes. Nurturists, and even more, mind-body dualists (particularly religious ones), seized on this as proof that human nature is sui generis and not physically determined by such a relative paucity of genes.<BR>Ridley shows the falsehood of this on several fronts. First, on the mathematics, 30,000 genes, with recombinant variants, would produce well more variants than human population numbers.<P>Second, he addresses this from a botany vs. zoology view, showing how plants have separate genes for manifestation of certain genetic information, rather than reduplication of genetic segments, as is the case with animals.<BR>Third, Ridley tells how some genes have multiple exons, slightly variant, only one of which is selected during a particular protein translation after RNA transcription, and that each different exon can produce a different protein.<BR>Testimony to the power of this book is shown on the dust jacket, which has blurbs from such strong naturists as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker.<BR>I will agree with one reviewer below that it is amazing this book comes from the author of Genome, as just a couple of years ago I would have placed Ridley firmly in the camp of Dawkins and Pinker. Unfortunately, the book has no comments from Ridley as to how and why his views evolved.</Content>
</Review>
<Review>
<ASIN>0060006781</ASIN>
<Rating>1</Rating>
<HelpfulVotes>1</HelpfulVotes>
<TotalVotes>5</TotalVotes>
<Date>2004-07-06</Date>
<Summary>Good general concepts ruined by bias in examples</Summary>
<Content>I am reviewing the Agile Gene, which is a reprint of Nature via Nurture (it is the identical book). The first part of the book gave me hope for some sort of middle ground where a popular scientist might acknowledge the complexity of how indirectly genes and biology affect human behavior (as opposed to the glib "gay gene discovered," "gene for aggression discovered" articles you see so often).<P>He did this-- his book acknowledges, for example, that if you do a twin study of families in middle-class America, you have indirectly limited the influence of the environment (by excluding more diverse cultures) and therefore the influence of genes on variability in a trait will be larger. The problem is, he then proceeds to completely ignore this informative, nuanced view when tackling the controversial issues that get people interested in the Nature-Nurture debate in the first place (gender roles, homosexuality, and mental illness for example). <P>Like so many science writers, he has little apparent knowledge of the humanities, social history, etc., and he holds his own preferred beliefs about human nature to a lower standard of proof than his opponents'. It is actually true that, as part of his defense of the idea of innate gender roles, he made reference to both the humorist Dave Barry *and* the popular work "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." Don't get me wrong, I like Dave Barry, but he would be the first one to point out that he's not a scientific authority on cross-cultural gender studies!<P>Ridley claims that [American or British] men's focus on "things" over "relationships" is genetic, but this idea, combined with his bit on homosexuality, merely shows that he needs to travel more. In America, women have much gushier friendships than men-they have "girlfriends" but we aren't supposed to have "boyfriends"-but this is not true in most places. In Latin America and many parts of Asia, Africa, and southern Europe, it is normal for straight men to kiss each other, hold hands, sometimes even have rituals of commitment to their friendships, etc. This also challenges the "gay gene" hypothesis: if big chunks of what Americans call "gay" are considered to be "straight" throughout the rest of the world, what would the gay gene code for? Even if it coded strictly for sex, in Mexico the top boy is often considered straight, and plenty of people everywhere experiment outside their "official" orientation. What all of this shows is that even if you have a gene for something, language and culture get added to it to create the final meaning. Ridley even acknowledges this ("genes enable, they don't restrict") but doesn't follow his own theory to its logical conclusion. <P>In his section about the genetic basis of monogamy, he infers that because Margaret Mead failed to find a truly sexually libertine society in Samoa, they must not exist anywhere. (Mead was seeking a society without a taboo on premarital sex, which she could now find in any major American city.) He also assumes that all experiments with open marriage in Western societies had failed; if he had actually taken the time to look, he would know that people still practice open marriage today. Yes, some people have a lot of trouble with jealousy and give up on it, but others I have met find that open relationships are second nature to them. So, if Mr. Ridley had taken the time to talk to anyone from the cultures he claims cannot exist, he could have an interesting discussion about individual differences in sexual jealousy (genetic or environmental?). Instead, we simply learn that, in addition to not knowing where the social history section of the library is, Matt Ridley also does not know how to find subcultures on the Internet or check his local alternative paper for club meetings.<P>In an otherwise-well-written chapter, he says that schizophrenia genes might have survived natural selection because in another combination they can lead to inventiveness. Well and good, but another reason these genes could be passed down is because not all cultures see "hearing voices" as a bad thing-some even see it as a form of religious inspiration! Even among those cultures that do see it as bad, most cultures do not leave their ill members out in the woods to die. But in Ridley-land, our ancestors were apparently all American Republicans in gated communities who go on rants about the danger of socialized medicine!<P>I find it truly scary that this man has written a book called "Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature." He doesn't know the first thing about the diversity of human sexuality, friendship, or love. On the other hand, his book HAS awakened me to a new truth: maybe the problem with advocates of genetic sources of behavior isn't so much the fact that they believe that human diversity comes from genetic sources, as the fact that they base their theories on so little knowledge of what human diversity actually entails. Whether it's based on genes, environment, both, or neither, there's a whole lot more under the sun than is dreamt of in Matt Ridley's philosophy.</Content>
</Review>
<Review>
<ASIN>0060006781</ASIN>
<Rating>4</Rating>
<HelpfulVotes>3</HelpfulVotes>
<TotalVotes>3</TotalVotes>
<Date>2004-06-05</Date>
<Summary>Another excellent work from Ridley</Summary>
<Content>Following on from Genome (which I've reviewed), I find Matt Ridley very easy to read. <P>Here he selects 12 'Hairy Scientists', some famous (eg Freud, Pavlov, Darwin), some not so famous, and weaves a wonderful story as he takes us through the highs and lows of their research & that of their contemporaries, bringing us right up to date with the Genome. With interesting anecdotes he brings each individual to life. <P>The 7 moral conclusions at the end were particularly useful, especially No. 2 "being a good parent still matters"<P>Given I'm now in the process of reading a similar book with some very poor illustrations, it was only afterwards looking back, that I see that I was entertained & educated without the need for any sketches or diagrams, and yet didn't feel cheated, deprived or confused.</Content>
</Review>
<Review>
<ASIN>0060006781</ASIN>
<Rating>2</Rating>
<HelpfulVotes>0</HelpfulVotes>
<TotalVotes>11</TotalVotes>
<Date>2004-05-10</Date>
<Summary>C'mon now...</Summary>
<Content>You can be reasonably sure that any "scientist" who readily endorses Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist is inappropriately abusing his position to promote his political agenda.</Content>
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The Request that Generated the Response (REST)
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService
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