The Romans invoked Fortuna, the goddess of luck, to explain the unexplainable; fortune-tellers study tea leaves to predict the unpredictable. In Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, Robert Plomin defies the ancients and the mystics, promising that your fortune can be predicted and explained by your genes.
Plomin is a psychologist who built his scientific reputation on twin and adoption studies of intelligence, academic achievement and mental health problems. In a book that urges working ‘with the grain’ of your unique gifts, Plomin’s talents as a scientist are clearest in the first half of the book, where he narrates the major projects of his tentacular career — first an adoption study in Colorado, then a US-wide study of adolescent siblings, and finally a twin study in the UK.
A reader new to the subject will learn a lot from these early chapters about the logic of twin studies and the ‘big findings’ of behavioural genetics.
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