The Selfish Genome

“With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases,” the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote, in The Sickness Unto Death—not exactly a jolly title. “The more consciousness, the more intense the despair.” In that spirit, Genes, Cells, and Brains: The Promethean Promises of the New Biology, arrives as a skeptical view of the alleged progress offered by genetics, cellular biology, and neuroscience. Hilary Rose, a sociologist at Bradford University and the London School of Economics, and her husband Steven Rose, a biologist and neuroscientist from Open University, unwind the myriad assumptions about technology as the engine of improvement in our lives and offers a powerful argument against the sociopolitical machinery behind these dream disciplines.