Review: G Is for Genes: The Impact of Genetics on Education and Achievement (Kathryn Asbury, Robert Plomin)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17015094-g-is-for-genes

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=97ac0ec914522d3c888679e9c02291c6

So i kept finding references to this book in papers, so i decided to read it. It is a quick read introducing behavior genetics and the results from it to lay readers and perhaps policy makers. The book is overly long (200) for its content, it cud easily have been cut 30 pages. The book itself contains not much new to people familiar with the field (i.e. me), however there are some references that were interesting and unknown to me. It may pay for the expert to simply skim the reference lists for each chapter and read those papers instead.

The main thrust of the book is what policies we shud implement becus of our ‘new’ behavioral genetic knowledge. Basically the authors think that we need to add more choice to schools becus everybody is different and we want to use the gene-environment correlations to improve results. It is hard to disagree with this. They go on about how labeling is bad, but obviously labeling is useful for talking about things.

If one is interested in school policy then reading this book may be worth it, especially if one is a layman. If one is interested in learning behavior genetics, read something else (e.g. Plomin’s 2012 textbook)