Mutants
On Genetic Variety and the Human Body
What developmental abnormalities reveal about how bodies are built, written about the people rather than the conditions.
The evolutionary biologist Armand Marie Leroi uses human deformity as a way into the genetics of the body’s construction. Each chapter takes a condition, among them conjoined twins, dwarfism, hermaphroditism, hairiness and premature ageing, and works back from it to the developmental genes whose failure produced it, so that the exception explains the rule. Leroi writes about his subjects as people, drawing on the records of the freak shows and anatomical cabinets that first collected them. Winner of the Guardian First Book Award.
Recommended by 1 Person
Carl Zimmer
Armand Leroi is a biologist at Imperial College, London. And this is a really wonderful book because Leroi takes what could have just been a freak show and turns it into a really amazing experience. He writes about these people as people. He finds wonderful portraits of individuals – for example, some of them are covered in hair and look like wolves – and he tells the story of their lives in quite beautiful prose.
Interview · September 2012
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