Over-exuberant press accounts of recent genetic linkage studies have led the public to believe that there is a "gay gene," a "gene for novelty-seeking," a "gene for happiness" and a gene for just about every other human idiosyncrasy. But to biologists who study even comparatively simple animals such as the fruit fly, it's laughable to speak of any single gene as determining behavior. Time, Love, Memory, Jonathan Weiner's first book since his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Beak of the Finch, is about a little-known Caltech geneticist named Seymour Benzer and his innovative experiments on bacteria-eating phage and Drosophila fruit flies. By tracing four decades of Benzer's painstaking work, Weiner shows that biology's picture of the relationship between genes and behavior is growing more baroque, not less.

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