The sub-title of this book is ‘A Great Biologist and his Quest for the Origins of Behavour’. The biologist is Seymour Benzer who is well known, to geneticists at least, for his demonstration that a gene, like an atom, can be split. His later work on behaviour genes in Drosophila, genes in a popular sense for time, love, and memory, is perhaps less well known but it has equal, if not greater, implications for our understanding of the relationship between genotype and phenotype. Benzer’s early work was not controversial but his demonstration that an organism’s genes have a direct effect on its sense of time, its sexual orientation, and its ability to remember, runs counter to the politically correct views of the environmentalists.

Weiner’s book, therefore, is welcome because it gives wider publicity to the growing field of behaviour genetics. He has interviewed Benzer and other scientists in the field and the book is likely to be used as a source for future historians of biology, genetics, and behaviour. They will have to read it critically however because it unfortunately is not without some serious historical errors. A particular example occurs on page 21 where Weiner states that “neither Galton nor Darwin ever read his [Mendel’s] paper.” He may be right about Darwin but it is known that Galton was well aware of Mendel’s work. He is even recorded as feeling sentimentally connected with Mendel because they were both born in 1822¹.

While there is much of interest in the book it is also spoiled by the author’s prejudice against eugenics in general and Galton in particular. At one point (page 94) he even suggests that Galton was ultimately responsible for the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. This statement conveniently ignores the fact that anti-Semitism was alive and well, especially in Central Europe, several centuries before Galton was born.

Seymour Benzer is truly one of the great biologists of the 20th century. He has preferred science to publicity, the laboratory to the television screen. He keeps a low profile perhaps because of the treatment other scientists who have suggested a link between genes and behaviour, including intelligence, have received in environmentalist dominated institutions. His work, however, is of great significance and it is to be hoped that one day it will be recorded in a biography free from inaccurate and unnecessary attacks on his predecessor in behaviour genetics, Francis Galton.

John Timson

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