THE SOCIAL GENOME

A pioneering scientist presents a mind-expanding account of the sociogenomics revolution, which promises to upend everything we know about human development.

For decades, Dalton Conley tried to answer the big social questionsabout why groups hold together, about inequality, and morethrough the traditional tools of his first field, sociology. He eventually found that those tools could take him only so far. So he went back to school and got another PhDin biology. Now, in The Social Genome, Conley explains how the new field he has helped to pioneer, sociogenomics, will upend our world. The key is the polygenic index, which allows us to analyze DNA to broadly predict a child's futurenot just their height or their weight, but how they may be expected to fare in school, and much more. He argues that we should no longer think of nature versus nurture, but of how our genes need nurture to work and how, in turn, our environments are made partly from the genes of other people. The implications of this new sciencefor our sense of self, for our social policiesare vast. Dalton Conley is a professor at Princeton University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and received the National Science Foundation's award for best young scientist, mathematician, or engineer.