First of all, Gariepy should be commended for the work involved in writing and preparing this book. It is pretty clear that this is a lone effort, and having responsibility for everything can be a daunting task. My rating of 2-stars is intended to credit Gariepy with 5-star effort, subtracting a star for the book's severe problems with organization and clarity, and two more stars for its ultimate failure in demonstrating its intended scientific objective. If you are a fan of his show, or just want to understand his terminology, by all means get the book.
Details:
1). The book is in dire, dire need of editing. Sections often read like stream of consciousness, and early chapter breaks appear arbitrary. Some chapters read as if they were written in isolation, repeating ideas and detail previously mentioned. I am trained in biology (as well as a fan of JF's show!) , and was motivated to read the material, but felt downright exhausted by the mid-way point. Concepts were presented with very little higher organization or relational structure, and it was much like talking to an excited scientist saying "this, and this, and then this too! And then..." I'll come back to this point later, because it is worth noting.
I think these problems could have largely been solved by spending a few more weeks with the "raw text", and attending to several things: redundancies, chapter organization, transitional text. When there is a lot of detail, it needs organization, and the reader needs to have principles to guide their way through it. Also, there were a few spots where references may date badly in the book's future. I winced a bit at an early reference to "Elon Musk's spaceship time machine". It is a funny reference now, but will no doubt sour in the future.
2). Gariepy introduces a lot of terminology in passing, and some of it is quite fun to read. Despite the disorganization, reading about things like "trickster printers" and "replicator tangos" should make even the most dour reader smile just a little. Unfortunately, a lot of this terminology is ephemeral, brought on stage to denote or itemize something, and then either never mentioned again, or never linked to a larger structure. Gariepy ostensibly introduces these ideas to support his central theses, but it is never made clear why they are necessary.
By analogy, it is like reading a book on the physics of how aircraft fly, and finding chapters dedicated entirely to a taxonomy of thrust-producing objects. It can all read very detailed and interesting, yet is totally unnecessary to understanding how thrust functions in aircraft physics. I'm not saying that Gariepy is wrong in any of his ventures into terminology and structure, but he needs to articulate how it serves his larger idea. Without that linkage, chapters on "trickster printers" and the like merely add a lot of terminology baggage to what is already contained in his original explanation.
3). The central premises of Gariepy's book are as follows, paraphrasing: a) genetic coding can be stored separate from the coded organism; b) the nature of this coding is itself coded in the organism; c) the organism can modify the stored code, so that replications produced by a given storage are improvements upon the original; d) ultimately, because the storage mechanism itself begins to dominate genetic inheritance and transfer, it will subsume the role of the original organism. In a simplistic sense, the "storage" dominates the "storer", and becomes the new "storer".
Gariepy presents these ideas with a number of helpful analogies and applications, from the original RNA-DNA linkage, to queen-worker ants, to humans using computer storage. I liked this quite a lot, actually, because it allows a variety of readers to understand what he's saying. Different analogies work for different people.
The only fault I would find here is one of redundancy, and ultimately breadth of content. If we take away the unneeded detail (see above), and account for the many helpful analogies, there isn't much here beyond the central premise itself. I was heartened that Gariepy gave passing attention to nested structures later in the book (including what I think is the book's first (only?) diagram), but felt that he missed a chance to discuss the key idea - the competing fitness of improved copies with still-reproducing originals. How and when does this system stabilize, go to asymptote? He seems to have spent a lot of time talking about a fairly straight forward idea, and aside from the extinction concept, didn't add any predictive value to it. In that sense, what he gives us is a theory whose only falsifiability is hypothetical.
Closing Remark:
Although I was critical above, I want to close by saying that one of the things that motivated me to finish the book, despite the many problems, was Gariepy's clear affection and enthusiasm for the material. He loves this stuff, and loves explaining it to others. It is unfortunate that academia has turned off many scientists with enthusiasm like Gariepy's, in pursuit of cookie-cutter publications or stacks of grant applications.
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A significant undertaking, but falls far short of the mark
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A Biologist's Plea to Consciously Choose Against Gene Editing Before It's Too Late
By Susan W. on January 14, 2019
Although I took onboard some of the understandable criticisms from other reviewers around technicalities of writing style and editing choices, I felt that the work was refreshing, engaging, important and truly original enough to ultimately garner my sustained interest. Although I assume I will be long gone before these postulated dire effects of uncontrolled gene editing accrue to anything that would impinge upon my life - or the lives of my children and grandchildren - I nevertheless found myself caring - quite a lot - about the conscious, deliberate choices we must make NOW toward preserving what is, at bottom, uniquely 'human' about us as a species. Just because something CAN be effected, it does not follow that it SHOULD be done. So-called progress for progress' sake should not be an end in itself. Jean- Francois Gariepy's book is a must-read - even for armchair enthusiasts of topics around AI, biology and transhumanism - such as myself - with yet no particular professional connection to the subject.
By Susan W. on January 14, 2019
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