Stanford University Press Blog

The Genome Under the Microscope

Social genomics holds great promise but may run the risk of naturalizing human difference.

by CATHERINE BLISS

Photo from the University of Michigan's DNA lab. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Since the mapping of the genome in 2000, scientists have sought to uncover what makes us tick by putting our genes under the microscope. Trait after trait has been subjected to genomic testing, and the fruits of that research have been splashed across headlines: “‘Gangsta Gene’ Identified in US Teens,” trumpeted one article in the New Scientist; “Happiness is in your DNA,” heralded The Economist. This avalanche of research has emerged from a new form of science, what I call “sociogenomics,” which melds genetic and social science approaches to understand the gene-environment interactions that make up various phenomena in our lives. Sociogenomics is practiced by lots of different scientists, geneticists, sociologists, economists, and behaviorists, but a new field that is driving its innovation is that of social genomics.

An avalanche of research has emerged from a new form of science, what I call “sociogenomics,” which melds genetic and social science approaches.

Social genomics focuses on social behavior and outcomes, things like making it through school and going to the polls to vote. Social genomics is not just interdisciplinary. It is transdisciplinary. It goes beyond adding natural and social science methods to blending them and coming up with new ones. It holds great potential for transforming science in important ways, because it has the power to pull together the best practices of all its disciplinary home bases. As the old adage goes, it is greater than the sum of its parts.

The President’s Clout

For a first-year president, Trump’s presidential leverage is at a historic low.

by DANIEL E. PONDER

Photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Dominique A. Pineiro. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

For a person, indeed a president, so obsessed with “ratings,” Donald Trump must find his approval ratings jarring. While virtually all presidents start their terms with high approval, Trump started low, sank fast, and kept digging. Even George W. Bush, who came to office after a heavily contested election, began with 57 percent approval. Meanwhile, Trump, who is now approaching the milestone one-year mark of his presidency, has languished in the 30s for months, averaging just under 39 percent. To be sure, a few presidents have endured approval levels below his, but they did so in the midst of extraordinary times: Truman during the Korean War, Nixon on the cusp of resignation, Ford following his pardon of Nixon, Carter in the midst of the Iran-Hostage crisis, George H.W. Bush on the brink of losing the presidency to Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush post-Hurricane Katrina all posted lower approval ratings. Even Barack Obama briefly dipped into the 30s in September 2011, during the budget negotiation debacle. But no one has begun so low and fallen so quickly and consistently as Donald Trump.

Presidential approval is arguably the most cited statistic in American politics. Presidents with high approval ratings are likely to be deemed powerful, particularly by the media, whereas presidents with low or middling opinion are seen as weak or ineffective. But is approval all it’s cracked up to be?

Presidential approval is arguably the most cited statistic in American politics—but is it all it's cracked up to be?

As Bad As Death

For Syrians, military strategies of food deprivation, siege, and starvation are both present and past.

by MELANIE S. TANIELIAN

Photo by Ben White. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

In a Cairo newspaper, under the headline “News from Syria,” a journalist relayed a harrowing account of one family’s exodus from their war-torn home:

A Moslem family arrived in Egypt from Tripoli, Syria, about a couple of weeks ago. The account of their escape reads more like fiction than reality. During many a long night, patiently and secretly, the work of building a small skiff was carried on inside the house; and, as soon as it was completed, the frail boat was launched on a rather rough sea. Even the old mother was dumped down in the boat under the cover of darkness, and the journey to a place of safety—the name of which is withheld for obvious reasons—was a long drawn agony; the occupants of the boat were almost all the time waist deep in water, and it was only through tireless and desperate baling that the constant danger of sinking was averted. To have thus braved such a voyage the situation left behind must have been as bad indeed as death.

Today, this story of escape, of war-hardened migrants braving the waters of the Mediterranean, does not sound like fiction at all. The reality of the twenty-first century is that such perilous journeys in unsafe vessels remain one of the few options left for those fleeing wars and violence, and those seeking to escape economic hardships—conditions, in other words, “as bad indeed as death.” The sea, an unforgiving mediator on which many refugees have staked their lives, has taken its toll: The United Nations High Commissioners for Refugees reports that in 2015 over a million migrants (the daily average reaching 2,700), most escaping the ongoing conflict in Syria, arrived in Europe by sea. But this story of a desperate Syrian family fleeing their home by makeshift boat is not one of those stories: It is the account of a journey undertaken nearly a hundred years ago by a family whose trek was one among thousands in its own time, though few such journeys were remembered. And while it bears striking resemblance to what we see in the daily headlines of 2017, this article was documenting the trauma of another war, the First World War, that much like the chaos taking place today, made home front conditions unlivable.

Given conditions on the ground, it is little wonder that Syrians today are following the same path trod by thousands of Syrians a century go, escaping their homes by any means necessary.

How We Read

10 surprising insights about how we process, recall, and engage with what we read.

by ANDREW ELFENBEIN

CC0 via Pixabay.

Reading is one of the most complex acts of the human mind: it involves everything from basic pattern recognition to complicated problem solving. Yet, while teaching reading to children receives great attention within schools of education, scholars in the humanities have been far less systematic in their understanding of adult reading. Literary scholars even use “reading” as a synonym for interpretation; in literary criticism, a reading of a poem or novel means not the act of reading it, but the interpretation of it according to strict disciplinary norms.

In The Gist of Reading, I wanted to bring reading, rather than interpretation, to the foreground, and to do so I went beyond the familiar vocabulary of literary criticism. I turned instead to empirical psychology, which presented me with an image of reading quite different from the one that I had known. Drawing on findings from this field as well as my own empirical and historical work on reading, I discovered a wide array of surprising insights while writing The Gist of Reading:

 

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WHEN YOU REMEMBER A NOVEL, YOU DON'T REMEMBER THE NOVEL. By the time you reach the end of a book, you will have forgotten many, if not all, of the sentences it contains. Instead, if you have understood it well, you will have a mental model of it that contains major points and connections between them. But, more than that, your model may also include much that the book did not state explicitly: inferences about character’s motivations and feelings; autobiographical associations; emotional experiences. None of these are “in” the book, but they can become part of your memory of it. That memory is what I mean by “gist.” I use it to foreground the difference between the work itself and what readers make of the work in their long-term memory.