Review of 'Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
I wondered what I was getting into when I started this book as many of the "mutants" described are very seriously disabled people due to birth defects. However, continuing through the book it is a compassionate description of how small genetic differences can lead to huge changes in animal and human physiologies.
I probably need to reread this book at some stage to annotate the interesting observations but since it is a few years old it probably is getting a bit out of date as scientific knowledge has progressed.
One thing that it lead me to consider was that ageing may be adverse manifestation of the genes that were useful to us until our expected age of child-rearing is complete. Humans have never lived longer than we live today and some bad effects of useful genes have never been seen until modern times as prehistoric people just didn't live long …
I wondered what I was getting into when I started this book as many of the "mutants" described are very seriously disabled people due to birth defects. However, continuing through the book it is a compassionate description of how small genetic differences can lead to huge changes in animal and human physiologies.
I probably need to reread this book at some stage to annotate the interesting observations but since it is a few years old it probably is getting a bit out of date as scientific knowledge has progressed.
One thing that it lead me to consider was that ageing may be adverse manifestation of the genes that were useful to us until our expected age of child-rearing is complete. Humans have never lived longer than we live today and some bad effects of useful genes have never been seen until modern times as prehistoric people just didn't live long enough to express them.
