Free PDF Mean Genes: Can We Tame Our Primal Instincts?, by Terry Burnham, Jay Phelan
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Mean Genes: Can We Tame Our Primal Instincts?, by Terry Burnham, Jay Phelan
Free PDF Mean Genes: Can We Tame Our Primal Instincts?, by Terry Burnham, Jay Phelan
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This text takes a look at why our toughest battles are often with ourselves. It uses a Darwinian lens to examine the issues that most affect our lives: body image, money, addiction, violence, the endless search for love and happiness. It reveals that the struggles for self-improvement are battles against our own genes, the genes that helped our ancestors flourish but are selfish and out of place in an industrial world. Burnham and Phelan don't simply describe the connections between genes and behaviour; they offer steps for improving the quality of our lives.
- Sales Rank: #10830834 in Books
- Published on: 2003-04-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Amazon.com Review
"Don't trust your instincts." Hardly the standard self-help fare, to be sure. Arguing that Darwin has a lot more to tell us about ourselves than Freud, Mean Genes is high on evolution and low on inner child. Deemed "brilliant" by none other than E.O. Wilson himself, the book is the work of two young Wilson disciples: Terry Burnham, an economics professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and Jay Phelan, a professor of biology at UCLA.
Burnham and Phelan divide life issues into 10 categories (debt, fat, drugs, risk, greed, gender, beauty, infidelity, family, and friends and foes), and then offer up a two-step guide to better living: "Step 1 is to understand our animal nature, particularly those desires that get us into trouble and can lead to unhappiness. Step 2 is to harness this knowledge so that we can tame our primal instincts."
Needless to say, Nancy Reaganesque bromides don't fit into the Mean Genes scheme of things: "Just say no" to drugs is the simplest way to kick a habit. Unfortunately, this obvious and low-cost approach is also the route most likely to fail. For example, only one person quits smoking for every twenty who attempt to just say no. Raw willpower seems like a great solution right up until weakness strikes and we light up a cigarette or mix a margarita. Instead of slogans, the Mean Genes approach to overcoming drug addiction is to first recognize that "every person has strong, instinctual cravings for destructive substances." This, coupled with a thorough scientific understanding of a given drug's pleasurable effects on the brain, offers a more realistic course of action, such as finding a less harmful substitute for achieving a similar buzz.
Be it talk of weight loss, saving for retirement, or resisting the neighbor's wife, such practical, tough-love suggestions for subduing the beast within are provided throughout the book. Phelan describes how he instantly smears mayonnaise all over tempting sweets served with airline meals to keep from eating them during long flights, and Burnham writes of giving away his Internet access cable in order to free himself of a serious day-trading fixation.
The authors also rely heavily on findings from the animal world in stating their case, which makes for fascinating reading, if not always for the most readily transferable lessons to daily life. Consider, for example, certain frog species that "continue individual bouts of mating for several months. If people mated for a similar percentage of our lives, a single round of intercourse would last almost ten years." And then there's the famed black widow spider. "Shunning the more traditional chastity belt, the male breaks off his sexual organ inside the female, preventing her from ever mating again. When the act is completed, the female kills and eats the male."
Put off by all the sex and violence? Don't worry. There's also a nod to family values in the form of the Australian social spider. "Soon after giving birth to about a hundred hungry spiderlings, Mom's body literally liquefies into a pile of mushy flesh. The babies then munch on the flesh so they can start their lives with full bellies."
Mean genes indeed. --Patrick Jennings
From Publishers Weekly
Genes are credited or blamed these days for more and more human behaviors and predicamentsDbut gambling, courtesy and even greed? Phelan, a professor of economics at Harvard, and Burnham, a biology professor at UCLA, focus not on the mechanisms of particular genes but on the effects of more general evolutionary patterns. In this enormously entertaining sociobiological overview, they argue that humans are well adapted to the environment in which we originated, but since we are no longer hunter-gatherers, instincts that evolved under those conditions can lead to harmful excess in today's world. Obesity, for example, occurs because early humans faced food shortages and adapted to store fat in their bodies. Burnham and Phelan explain the evolutionary basis for such troublesome matters as overspending, gambling, drug abuse, sexual infidelity, rudeness and greed. The point, they emphasize, is not to excuse harmful behaviors, but to understand that they are part of our animal natures. This approach, they believe, enables us to find better ways to cope with these problems than mere willpowerDin their view, a tactic doomed to failure since it runs counter to instinct. Burnham and Phelan cite their own amusing strategies for dealing with food and gambling problems, and insist that anyone can learn to "tame" their "mean genes." Though this book only scratches the surface of a subject considered in detail by such scientists as E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and Sara Blaffer Hrdy, it is sure to generate wide popular interest. Agents, John Brockman and Katinka Matson. Author tour; 20-city radio satellite tour. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
In this brassy popularization of evolutionary biology, the authors dissect a range of human behavioral maladies: addiction, obesity, infidelity, avarice, power-tripping, and more. Economist Burnham and biologist Phelan argue that such behaviors are genetic inheritances from humanity's hunter-gatherer days: whatever then kept an individual one step ahead of the leopard, we descendants embody in our genes. The authors alight on such a plethora of aspects of being human that their tour is constantly stimulating, whether discussing people's propensity to overeating or their relentless optimism about the future, even under horrible circumstances. Burnham and Phelan are continually provocative as well, and readers will discover themselves objecting to one or another of their assertions, until the authors conversationally trundle up some experiment in support. Far from raising the white flag in our battles with instincts, the authors advance tactics of self-control for our next temptation, be it a sundae, stock tip, or pretty face. A delightfully readable presentation of the evolutionary, as distinct from the moralized, appreciation of human nature. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Will change the way you see most of your behaviors in life!
By Pedro
This book will teach you so much about inherited behavior that it makes you want to read more.
== Spoiler Alert(beginning) ==
Let me give you an example of some fascinating thing you learn : You know how most of us are keen on fatty and sugary food, well the authors explained why is that so.
Let's think back to our ancestors (cave men); back then, when a hunter killed an animal (let's say a giraffe) they couldn't storage the leftovers and after a while the giraffe would spoil. So what would be the wise thing to do back then? Well the best to do would be to eat as much as you could and store the extra food as fat in your body (you know those love handles).
Now let's see why we inherited this behavior; the cave men (and women) who wouldn't overeat (what today we consider a wise thing, with reason) would die if there was a shortage of food, while those who put up some fat for the winter would survive. Now guess what, who do you think we came from? Of course we came from those who survived, the overeaters.
The problem we have now is that society has change in the way that you don't spend 700 cal. to bring home some food, but instead about 0.5 cal. ordering a pizza through your phone. So society changed but our genes didn't!
== Spoiler Alert(end) ==
Anyway, that was one of the many many examples of behaviors in this book!
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Mean Genes Is An Exceptional Book
By Rex Bennett
As I take time to write this review, I find that - as of this writing - 77 others have taken their time to write a review of "Mean Genes." This book has really struck a nerve with readers. It has tickled their funny bone as well as given insight into human nature, and most importantly to us, our own behaviors.
Mean Genes is a very unique book in that it provides important information on an intellectual topic but is written in such a manner that it is easily readable by the general reading public. This one aspect has most impressed me with this book - It is not only informative, but it is also so damn entertaining! If for no other reason, this book deserves 5 stars!
I am an avid reader of science books and am accustomed to reading complicated and dry material. Unfortunately, most readers will put down such a book before they actually learn anything. Mean Genes breaks this mold. These authors have used considerable skill to create a book that is a joy to read and still leaves one feeling that they have learned something useful.
This is not a "self-help book" in the normal sense. It does give us insight into our own behaviors and why it is almost impossible to change some of those behaviors. Our only hope is our understanding of why things are the way they are. This offers us an opportunity to overcome our own genetic programming to some degree. And if not, we at least know why it is that way.
But most importantly, this book makes the reader think. It helps us to take a second look at our own prejudices and assumptions. It provides a useful framework for examining behaviors. We get to think for ourselves about why things are the way they are and to reach insightful conclusions.
A word of warning! Once you pick up this book, you will find it almost impossible to put it down.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Oh boy here’s the book that can explain why you can’t stop
By Nancilee Wydra
and then fill in the blank...eating, spending money, hoarding. Ah, the power of genes...gotta love em cause you can’t get away from them. You don’t have to have one ounce of scientist in you to understand this clearly, well-written book.
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