This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

This week I'm joined by Professor Robert Plowman, the author of a new book called Blueprint, How DNA Makes Us Who We Are.

Now, Professor Plowman, we all know that DNA makes us, to a certain extent, we are.

Your book seems to make the case that it has far, far more wide-reaching effects on us than are commonly thought.

A lot of the things that we take to be environmental are actually written in our genes.

And your role is a behavioral geneticist. Can you explain a bit what that means?

Okay. Well, behavioral geneticist means you're studying the genetics of behavior, but specifically individual differences,

why some people are schizophrenic, others aren't,

why we differ in personality and learning ability, mental health and illness.

So we're studying differences.

And we're looking at the 1% of our 3 billion base pairs of DNA that differ to say,

do those make a difference?

Between individuals.

Between individuals.

Whereas the 99% is what makes us human.

And so it's all important in terms of the contribution to who we are,

but it's really important to emphasize we're describing differences that exist in a population,

why some kids are reading disabled and others aren't,

and asking the extent to which DNA accounts for those differences.

And what we've learned during my 45 years of research in this area is that the inherited DNA differences

account for a lot more of the differences than we used to think.

...