Nature versus nurture has been one of the most contentious issues in the human sciences for 150 years. On the one side are so-called “blank-slaters,” those who believe we are entirely shaped by our environment. On the other side are “hereditarians,” a term sometimes used to disparage people who believe in the deterministic primacy of genes. The fight has been highly politicized and extremely bitter with implications relating to racial disparities, meritocracy, fairness, reproduction, and even free will. For decades, pioneering scientist Dalton Conley tried to answer the big social questions-about why groups hold together, about inequality, and more-through the traditional tools of his first field, sociology. He eventually found that those tools could take him only so far. Now, in The Social Genome, Conley explains how the new field of sociogenomics will upend our world. Sociogenomics brings together advances in molecular genetics with traditional social and behavioral science. It is leading to exciting discoveries from how much alcohol is too much to how smoking spreads through teenage social networks to how spouses affect each other’s moods and behavior. But the sociogenomics revolution goes beyond just weighing the relative inputs of genes and the environment, it has called into question a dichotomy at the heart of the social sciences.
