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A few mental thorns in my side from The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee followed by an invasion from Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Great book, as expected based on his Emperor of All Maladies, but a couple of bits in the section "Truths and Reconciliations" did bother me. It started near the bottom of page 101, where he included "give wedding speeches" as a genetically transmitted entity. The other entities on the list were more plausible as capabilities directly related to genetic data, but I felt that particular capability needed to be abstracted more clearly, something like "a capability to create and deliver wedding speeches". Then on page 105 he says that without genetic diversity the entire species would either survive or go extinct, which struck me much harder as an actual overstatement. If the genes were identical, it would be a matter of random luck which individuals survived, but the species as a species might well continue to survive indefinitely. It would only be the appearance of some superior competitor that might tip the balance towards extinction.

I also had a notation about page 147, but on review, the only thing that strikes me is the especially intriguing reference to Schrodinger's What is Life? book. Not sure I'm going to read it, but I finally managed to locate a version in English in two nearby libraries. It's apparently embedded in a giant collection called Great Books of the Western World. About 750 pages in that volume 56? About a dozen books per volume? A whole lot of "greatness" going on... Back to the question of time.

On page 177 I was stuck by the word "blueprint", even though he modified it as "active blueprint", however later on he switched to the book-of-recipes metaphor. Upon later reflection I feel like his position is linked to his feelings as a physician who wants to do the best for every patient, no matter what the roll of the genes. This actually ties into my larger poke from the Part Five, where I felt he spent too much time on sexual topics without really reaching any conclusion. I feel like this is probably the part of the book where he should have discussed more deeply the motivation for sexual reproduction itself. Based on that physician perspective he has, I now feel like part of the reason he is shying away from those aspects is because of the random death, even including human deaths. Sexual reproduction has two aspects, one of which is stabilizing the breeding population by recombining gene's from different individuals to maintain some genetic consistency within a large population, but at the same time sexual reproduction is destabilizing, creating new mixes of genes at random. Mother Nature's goal is basically conservative and seeking equilibrium, but the conclusion is that there is only one natural approach: Each breeding pair should have roughly two survivors who reach reproductive age, and to keep things stable that means the less lucky combinations from the random destabilization aspect have to die before reproducing. Progress would actually suggest two or more shuffles, but the minimal equilibrium is an average of four children with the deaths of the two children who were least lucky in the genes they got. No parent and no physician likes that idea, but it's the reason I have come to my position in support of passive eugenics (based on genetic screening) so that parents have a tilted wager in favor of raising only two children who represent their better combinations. (He vaguely approaches some of these considerations in a note on page 360, but obviously not to my satisfaction.)

On page 293 I was reminded of Kuhn's paradigm shift, though Mukherjee never mentions the idea. This was just one of several areas that could have been analyzed from that perspective.

Page 313 has an extremely sharp thorn when he says "several million years ago" when it's more like 600 million years ago. Basically the same thorn on page 316 as "several million years of evolution", though the gap is more like 400 million years for insects.

Now for the intrusions from Walker's book. The genetic topic of interest was on page 145, where he writes about the BHLHE41 (AKA DEC2) gene as a factor allowing some people to do well with only 6 hours of sleep per night. I thought this was an excellent case for raising the distinction between passive and active genetics. I would argue that is would be okay to help parents with this gene try to tilt the scales in favor of their children having this gene. Not that it should be the primary factor in making their decisions, but over the long term they could increase the numbers of people who have the gene. That's a passive eugenics approach. In contrast, the active eugenics approach might involve attempting to deliberately insert the gene into the chromosomes of parents who don't have it. Based on that distinction, the recent work of He Jiankui is clearly an active genetics approach, and I would regard his approach as extreme to the point of insanity, apparently motivated by a desire for this 15 minutes of fame (per Andy Warhol).

Minor thorn from page 84 of Why We Sleep was the "breath rates" comment about babies just before birth (AKA "near-term fetus" in the citation in the note). There's something wrong with the passage "breath rates dropping from a normal rate of 381 per hour during natural sleep to just 4 per hour when the fetus was awash with alcohol." Hyperbolic wording, but the main question is "Before birth, there's no breathing going on here, so what is he talking about?"

On page 195 he's talking about MRI scans of sleeping people, but mostly I was wondering about the noise, or if they have a specially silenced MRI scanner.

On page 206 he assumes an incandescent bulb without saying so, though later in the book (on page 326) he talks about LED bulbs, so he knows about them (though he was apparently confused about how they work and even about the LED lights that can change their colors).

On page 209 he was talking about REM to remove negative emotions from memories for better learning, but mostly he reminded about the General Theory of Relatively Funny Stuff and how humor also supports learning. In some cases there's also some negative emotions, though usually not for humor-based learning.

Page 226 reminded me of my Zen collapse theory of extreme connectivity among ideas.

Page 234 is about lucid dreaming as an unusual skill, whereas I regard it as another aspect of our over-engineering.

Around page 326 he's talking about personalization, but doesn't really consider the problems of married couples with different sleeping patterns. Projecting too far (and revealing too much?) to say that I think that's my main sleeping problem?

Page 333 has an appeal to philanthropists for support, and I sort of considered pitching the ol' Charity Share Brokerage for small donors.

On page 340 he picks 3,400,000 years as the time for sleep to evolve, which seems like a really odd number.

So overall an interesting book, but too polemical and not as insightful as I'd hoped from the early sections. Mukherjee's book is much better and easier to recommend.