Reductionism is misleading for two reasons. First, as we have just seen, the unfathomable complexity of gene–environment interactions puts us a long way from understanding how any individual—with her lifetime of experiences, conversations, abuses, joys, ingested foods, recreational drugs, prescribed medications, pesticides, educational experience, and so on—will develop. It’s simply too complex and will presumably remain so. Second, even while it’s true that we are tied to our molecules and proteins and neurons—as strokes and hormones and drugs and microorganisms indisputably tell us—it does
...more
