LI Celebrity Alert: Steven Pinker

It feels great to write about a celebrity who is also a scientist. There are so few of those around.

But Steven Pinker is pretty close to a bona fide celebrity. He's written five books for a general audience, The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007). And he has the best scientist hair since Einstein.

He was a guest on The Colbert Report this week to talk about how he had his full genome read and all the genetic traits and tendencies that revealed. One of them was that he was lactose intolerant.

Watch the whole interview by clicking here.

A bit of searching found that he wrote about this in a very long essay in the New York Times Magazine. There he calls the appearance of the gene for lactose intolerance a "wrong prediction" since he tolerates ice cream just fine. And he also has the gene for a high risk of baldness.

That's the good news for those of you who get nervous thinking about what's hidden inside your own personal genome. You are not your genes. They guide but they don't rule.