I highly recommend The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought by Gary Marcus. It’s an excellent review of the data from the vantage point of a psychologist who knows his genetics & neurology.
Marcus :
1) is careful to elaborate the precise definition & context of heritability.
2) explains the importance of regulatory genes (Marcus is notes that the “language gene,” FOXP2, probably affects the expression of a host of other genes).
3) refutes the simplistic analogy of genome -> phenotypic traits with a blueprint -> building.
4) emphasizes the dynamism of gene + environment interaction (in a fashion similar to Nature via Nurture).
5) Highlights the omissions of those who popularize research that indicates a great degree of neurological plasticity (and implicitly flies in the face of mental modularity), both in the broad context and in the specific experiments themselves.
For me, the last point is what I want to get across, and as some have noted, the book might be thought of as a review of the literature in this area from 1995-2002. But for those in the lay public, this sort of refresher is crucial, because the popular press tends to throw stuff at us without proper context or framing.
Posted by razib at 11:06 AM