Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality Hardcover – September 29, 2020

This book is a mind-blowing, amazing look at some very surprising findings in the field of genetic studies. I haven't underlined so much since finals in college. When I shared a few passages aloud with family and friends, everybody wanted to either borrow my book (no way. This one I'm keeping.) or get the title and author so they could buy their own copy. Yes, there are passages that are fairly scientific, but the research is always propped up by lots of the most amazing stories, so it's easy to skip the data (if you like)and just read how the data looks in real life people, animals and situations.A woman with 2 different blood types? Why cloning won't get you a complete replica. A woman whose thyroid is made up of male cells? Why does the subway at rush hour in Seoul smell better than one in NY? On and on, the examples are just perfect for sharing with everyone you know and hearing them say: "Wow, I didn't know that! Amazing!"

Touches on a wide array of topics that wouldn't normally fit together yet, here, they do. Very enlightening.

Good read

I have been wondering why we humans have such trouble with the people we love. So many divorces, broken friendships, etc. Wouldn't it be more evolutionarily beneficial for everyone to be more compatible? Instead, we have evolved so that even identical twins have very different personalities.This book explains why each human is so unique, and shows that I had been thinking about it all wrong. To paraphrase the author, our brains have billions of neurons and 500 trillion synapses, and therefor the wiring of the human brain is so complicated that it cannot be specified exactly in our DNA. Subtle, random changes in the cells within the developing nervous system cascade through time to produce big difference in neural wiring and functioning.I learned this and a lot more from this book, including that roughly about 50% of our behavior is hereditary. That explains my kids! I definitely recommend this book, and thank the author for writing it.

If you could transform this book into an injectable therapeutic pharmaceutical, you would have a highly efficacious broad-spectrum BS vaccine (sorely needed these days). Great science, great humanity, great writing.

This book was like reading a fascinating textbook. It was entertaining and informative. I enjoyed it quiet a bit, and would recommend it to anyone.

Professor Linden does a lovely job, as always, of making science accessible to the hoi polloi.It was fascinating to read all the factors that go into making us who we are, and that it is a bit more complex than the "nature or nurture" cartoon arguments we've all heard too many times.

Unique by David Linden is a free NetGalley ebook that I read in late September.Down to earth enough to understand, yet not completely clinical enough to take seriously - he memory-related, intelligence, sensory, behavioral, and genetic/inheriting studies that Linden makes reference to usually involve commonalities between individuals or groups of people, so it seems more likely that a reader will consider them ‘remarkable,’ rather than ‘unique.’