Mean genes: From sex to money to food: Taming our primal instincts, by Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan. New York: Basic, 2012. Ireal Book Android Crack. Is evolutionary theory useful in the context of our everyday lives? Winterthur Grinding Handbook For Employers there. The newly released second edition of Mean Genes by Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan is written as a Darwinian self-help book for what we all use everyday: our own minds and bodies. The authors begin with the general premise that evolutionary thought can inform all areas of scientific inquiry.

In the four sections of the book that follow, they use this assumption to explain the annoying yet constant struggles that persist in our lives. The book draws rationale from evolutionary psychology and behavior to justify our attitudes toward debt, fat, drugs, risk, greed, gender, beauty, infidelity, family, and friends/foes.

Each topic is framed as a problem we confront in day-to-day life, documented with evidence from published anthropological, behavioral, and psychological scientific literature as well as examples from popular culture and personal anecdotes. Though the title may be reminiscent of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene ([ ]), Burnham and Phelan rely less on a strict interpretation of evolutionary theory and more on telling an entertaining narrative to describe and provide resolution for complex, multifaceted problems with which we are all intimately familiar. The first edition of Mean Genes was released over a decade ago. The second edition is supplemented by commentary at the beginning of each section as well as general reflections in a preface and at the conclusion. These additions discuss the contemporary social and cultural context of the book. For example, the preface to “Thin Wallets and Fat Bodies” includes updated 2010 statistics for incidence of obesity in the United States to document the continued relevance of their arguments since the first edition (p. The companion website at offers a “Notes and cited research section” with footnotes for the sometimes vague or oblique references in the text.

Citations, figures, and links to complete resources are arranged by section and page number in the book, although this resource hasn’t been updated to reflect added material and altered page numbers for the second edition. The main text of Mean Genes is an easy and entertaining read. Topics cover the breadth of human vices and are likely to maintain reader engagement. The conversational narrative will certainly deepen a reader’s understanding of humans who, over evolutionary time, are subject to the pressures of natural selection. These historic selective pressures range from those common to all organisms (a need to consume calories) to those relegated to complex social systems (a need to develop cooperative systems). Less explicitly stated is that selection still acts on human populations, although this phenomenon is occasionally mentioned in passing.

Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food Taming Our Primal Instincts PDF ebook. Download this book right now! Genetics, DNA, and Heredity The Basics. It's a history book - a narrative of the journey of our species through time. And 40,000 genes.

As a classroom text, there are several useful topics in Mean Genes that would allow students a meta-level perspective on their own learning. Embedded throughout the text are insights into human behavior, including how we learn and process data. The chapter on Risk, for example, discusses the difficulty we have understanding probabilities (p. 109), which embeds more practical learning. Finding these useful applications is challenging, as the major conclusions emphasized in Mean Genes are related to general ways of thinking to improve our lives. Additionally, assumptions about the social context of the arguments presented throughout the book can be alienating in some audiences. The current generation of high school or college student may find some popular culture references dated and unfamiliar.