Social Security Code from God

I came across this video this morning, which is a clip from Steven Pinker's second visit to the set of the Colbert Report. Shockingly, Colbert lets him talk for most of it, and there's not quite as much silliness as usual, and in the process Pinker shares some incredibly useful and interesting points about genetics that should be made known, mostly pertaining to his sequencing of his own genome and subsequent online sharing of his results. The main points I'm referring to are:

A) Genes are not deterministic - Pinker references the fact that he has the gene for early balding, and he's probably one of the least bald human beings in existence.

B) Genetic knowledge, although exciting, is not remarkably advanced at the moment. As Pinker puts it, with the current genetic knowledge, "you can get much more information about a person's health by measuring their health directly than by looking at their genome".

A lot of these points were included in my paper on genomics, published earlier this year.

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Steven Pinker
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