HEREDITY is a powerful concept. It’s the thing that ties families together—that gives shape to their shared history of stories, of homes, of personalities. And more and more, it’s the way we understand families’ shared genetic inheritance. But that more modern biological notion of heredity comes with some new, technical baggage: It’s easier to talk about the high blood pressure that runs in your family than it is to discern the alleles that define it, all the meiotic divisions that had to occur before that trait was passed down to you. And misunderstanding the role DNA does or doesn’t play in determining one’s fate can have dangerous consequences.
Luckily, acclaimed science writer Carl Zimmer is here to unravel the tangled history of the science and pseudoscience surrounding heredity, in all its many forms. In his expansive, engrossing, and often enlightening new book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh.
To read more on this fascinating concept, go to: https://www.wired.com/story/maybe-dna-cant-answer-all-our-questions-about-heredity/
