4 dictated a letter: Fischer and Lipson, Thinking About Biology, 234.
5 “Are we doing things”: Aspaturian interviews, 165.
“When you have one child”: S. Benzer, Crafoord Prize Lecture, Stockholm, September 27, 1993.
“gossip test”: Crick, Mad Pursuit, 17.
“He was right”: Benzer, “Adventures,” 157.
“I had almost gone”: Ibid., 165.
6 “a healthy corrective”: Crick, Mad Pursuit, 14.
“I think, but he knows”: Fischer et al., Thinking, 133.
“I must beg you”: Freud, “Lay Analysis,” in Stevenson, Human Nature, 167.
“We must recollect”: Freud, “On Narcissism”; quoted in Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), xv.
full of cotton: See M. E. Bitterman, “Psychology via Physiology: Review of The Neuroscience of Animal Intelligence, by Euan M. Macphail,” Science 263 (1994): 1635–6.
7 “the stifling soul cloud”: J. B. Watson, Chap. 1, Behaviorism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1925); excerpted in Stevenson, Human Nature, 193–8.
“guarantee to take any one”: Watson, Behaviorism, 81; quoted in Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 81.
“Very few people”: B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953); excerpted in Stevenson, Human Nature, 199–218.
without a psyche Paul F. Cranefield uses this phrase in a somewhat different context in “The Philosophical and Cultural Interests of the Biophysics Movement in 1847,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 21 (1966): 7.
worn down to stubs: Gary Cziko, Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 117.
“The present unhappy condition”: Skinner, Science and Human Behavior; excerpted in Stevenson, Human Nature, 204.
8 “knowledge-microscopists”: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil; excerpted in Monroe C. Beardsley, ed., The European Philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 1993), 810.
“For precept must be”: Isaiah 28: 10, The Reader’s Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 943.
9 “visibly shift”: Plato, The Last Days of Socrates (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1959), 40.
“We burn with desire”: Blaise Pascal, Pensées (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 63.
“To study Metaphysics”: Darwin, Metaphysics, 71.
10 “Round and round”: D. H. Lawrence, “Man and Bat,” in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (New York: Haskell House, 1974), 103. Quoted in T. Tanner, “Out of England: Review of D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912–1922, by Mark Kinkead-Weekes,” Times Literary Supplement 4873 (1996): 3–4.
PART TWO: KONOPKA’S LAW
1 “Things are always best”: Pascal, Lettres Provinciales; quoted in John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 14th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968), 363.
CHAPTER SIX: FIRST LIGHT
1 “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose”: Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 150.
“Everyone who ever lived”: Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 8.
a little book: Dean E. Wooldridge, The Machinery of the Brain (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1963).
cut the optic nerves: Ibid., 20–2.
2 experiments with cats: Ibid., 169–74.
repeated this experiment: Ibid., 181.
3 “a travelogue”: Ibid., vii.
4 Cutting the corpus callosum: Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, and Thomas M. Jessell, eds., Principles of Neural Science (Norwalk, Conn.: Appleton & Lange, 1991), 833.
dominant for action and movement: Ibid., 835.
“I’m going to get a Coke”: Richard M. Restak, The Mind (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), 27.
its own characteristic function: Kandel, Principles, 7–9.
5 “I am a parcel”: Henry David Thoreau, “Sic Vita,” in F. O. Matthiessen, ed., The Oxford Book of American Verse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 241.
parliament of instincts: Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, Marjorie Kerr Wilson, trans. (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), 81.
“Humans were ruled out”: Benzer, Crafoord Lecture.
6 “Is astonishment expressed”: Darwin, Expression, 15.
“I put my face”: Ibid., 38.
7 “I have never tried”: Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Francis Darwin, ed. vol. 3 (London, 1887), 238; quoted in Janet Browne, Charles Darwin, vol. 1 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), xii.
“I think that a delight”: Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan and Co., 1883), 87.
a calculating prodigy: Galton, Memories, 271.
“up went a multitude”: Ibid., 273.
“the number of operations”: Galton, Inquiries, 186.
into the basement: Ibid.
8 “I myself have”: Ibid., 58–9.
9 “but I have seen”: Ibid., 60.
10 “Are they out of their minds?”: Wilson, Naturalist, 219–20.
“Imagine: biology transformed”: Ibid., 44.
“Without a trace of irony”: Ibid., 218–19.
“solemn, arrogant”: Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 16.
11 “He was a nice guy”: Aspaturian interviews, 117.
12 mixed up: Konrad Z. Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring (New York: Signet, 1972 [1952]), xvi.
“Don’t do fashionable research”: Fischer and Lipson, Thinking About Biology, 235.
CHAPTER SEVEN: FIRST CHOICE
1 “The brain is so vigorous”: Nathaniel Wanley, The Wonders of the Little World (London, 1788), 6; quoted in Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 34.
“I thought of a maze”: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, trans. (New York: New Directions, 1964), 23.
2 “I laid out”: Aspaturian interviews, 183.
“Obviously, that attitude”: Ibid., 185.
3 “At faculty meetings”: Wilson, Naturalist, 221.
“strange, though mistaken”: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981 [1871]), 43.
“What sort of insects”: Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (New York: New American Library, 1960 [1865 and 1871]), 151.
“Remember, there is”: Lwoff, Origins, 136.
“Dr. Horovitz, this is”: Aspaturian interviews, 38.
4 houses he had seen in Italy: Galton, Natural Inheritance, 8.
5 “Suppose we were building”: Ibid.
6 “namely, good in stock”: Galton, Inquiries, 24.
“We must free our minds”: Ibid., 3.
“capricious and coy”: Ibid., 56.
double-dealing misers: Galton once warmed up a lecture audience of fellow scientists at the British Association with a joke about stingy Jews; see Galton, Memories, 272.
“A little goodwill”: T. H. Morgan, Evolution and Genetics, 2d ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1925), 206–7; quoted in Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 133.
7 ardent eugenicist: See, e.g., H. J. Muller, Out of the Night: A Biologist’s View of the Future (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984 [1935]).
transformation of the human species: The last sentence is full of suppressed excitement: “The time is not ripe to discuss here such possibilities with reference to the human species.” Muller, “Artificial Transmutation,” 87.
“a whole genus”: Galton, Memories, 175.
8 “But it does not”: Galton, I
nquiries, 27.
“Health Fair”: Lewis, Arrowsmith, 268–72.
helped inspire the Nazis: Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995), 86.
keynote speech: The Galton Lecture, delivered before the Eugenics Society in London on February 17, 1936; in Julian S. Huxley, “Eugenics and Society,” The Eugenics Review 28, no. 1 (1936): 11–35.
“one of the supreme”: Ibid., 11.
“We cannot digest”: Ibid., 33–4.
9 “In some sort”: J. R. Oppenheimer, “Physics in the Contemporary World,” lecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 25, 1947; quoted in Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 1055.
“Such a change”: Rhodes, Atomic Bomb, 26.
“A girl of sixteen”: C. P. Blacker, “ ‘Eugenic’ Experiments Conducted by the Nazis on Human Subjects,” Eugenics Review 44, no. 1 (1952): 11.
“A man must be”: Galton, Natural Inheritance, 155.
10 “nothing but the form”: Quoted in Fred H. Wilholte, Jr., “Ethology and the Tradition of Political Thought,” Journal of Politics 33 (1971): 628–9; quoted in Degler, Human Nature, 230.
“Other people want”: Harding, interviews with Delbrück, 88.
11 “Oh, I don’t know”: Aspaturian interviews, 48–9.
“no decorative heroisms”: Lewis, Arrowsmith, 333.
CHAPTER EIGHT: FIRST TIME
1 “—As if the idea”: Darwin, Metaphysics, 8.
2 “The work can be done”: T. H. Morgan, letter to E.B. Babcock, June 15, 1920; quoted in Allen, Morgan, 291.
3 flight tester: Benzer, “Genetic Dissection of Behavior,” 28.
4 “And you claim”: Freud, “Lay Analysis,” in Stevenson, Human Nature, 166.
mad in honor of Max: K. Bergmann, A. P. Eslava, and E. Cerdá-Olmedo, “Mutants of Phycomyces with Abnormal Phototropism,” Molecular and General Genetics 123 (1973): 1–16; Fischer and Lipson, Thinking About Biology, 249. For a review of this and other early work in the atomic theory of behavior, see William G. Quinn and James L. Gould, “Nerves and Genes,” Nature 278 (1979): 19–23.
“trying all kinds”: Fischer and Lipson, Thinking About Biology, 245.
5 his first paper: Benzer, “Behavioral Mutants,” 1967.
“And doubtless”: Quoted in Fraser, Of Time, 179.
“The sensitive plant”: De Mairan, “Observation Botanique,” Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences (Paris, 1729), 35; quoted in Ritchie R. Ward, The Living Clocks (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 44–5. Ward is the chief source of my description of early clock work.
6 The passion flower would open: Fraser, Of Time, 182.
Euglena swims like an animal: Arthur T. Winfree, The Timing of Biological Clocks (New York: Scientific American Books, 1987), 111.
7 “All this showing”: Spinoza, Ethics; excerpted in Stevenson, Human Nature, 94–5.
elaborate experiments involving carrots: Ward describes Brown’s work in Living Clock, 259–78.
South Pole: Ibid., 279–99.
8 checked the clock in fruit flies: Colin S. Pittendrigh, “Temporal Organization: Reflections of a Darwinian Clock-watcher,” Annual Review of Physiology 55 (1993): 17–54.
“What we need”: Brown, Living Clocks, 299.
round-the-clock watches: Pittendrigh, “Temporal Organization.”
8 wrote up a report: Ronald J. Konopka and Seymour Benzer, “Clock Mutants of Drosophila melanogaster,” Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences 68 (1971): 2112–16.
“I don’t believe it”: I reconstructed this scene from interviews with Benzer and Konopka and from the account in Greenspan, “Emergence of Neurogenetics,” 150.
CHAPTER NINE: FIRST LOVE
1 “What is it men”: “The Question Answer’d,” Portable Blake, 135.
“embrangled in inextricable difficulties”: Quoted in Fraser, Of Time, 11.
try to put it into words: Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book 11: quoted in James McConkey, ed., The Anatomy of Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 50.
2 “all the dense fullness”: Plotinus, The Third Ennead; quoted in Fraser, Of Time, 23–4.
“Plato says that”: Darwin, Metaphysics, 30.
“was known principally”: David Park, The Image of Eternity: Roots of Time in the Physical World (Amherst, Mass.: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 16.
“Three things are”: Proverbs 30: 18–19.
3 “No, this trick won’t”: Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992), 124.
“When you swim”: Roger Payne, Among Whales (New York: Scribner’s, 1995), 145.
Male bowerbirds: Frank B. Gill, Ornithology (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1989), 179–81.
4 “One bower was”: Ibid., 180.
nematode worm: For early papers laying out the worm’s possibilities, see S. Brenner, “The Genetics of Caenorhabditis elegans,” Genetics 77 (1974): 71–94; and J. E. Sulston and S. Brenner, “The DNA of Caenorhabditis elegans,” Genetics 77 (1974): 95–104. Paul Sternberg is one of many molecular biologists now working on behavioral mutants in the worm. See, e.g., Katharine S. Liu and Paul W. Sternberg, “Sensory Regulation of Male Mating Behavior in Caenorhabditis elegans,” Neuron 14 (1995): 79–89.
5 In the Hawaiian archipelago: Herman T. Spieth, “Courtship Behavior in Drosophila,” Annual Review of Entomology 19 (1974): 385–405; Herman T. Spieth, Courtship Behaviors in the Hawaiian Picture-winged Drosophila (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
“contact of the labellar lobes”: Ibid., 10.
“If the female responds”: Ibid., 11.
6 “with the labellar lobes”: Ibid., 12.
7 Hall borrowed a set of mutants: They came from the Fly Lab of Dan Lindsley, at UCSD.
8 “Glory be to God”: Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty,” in Louis Untermeyer, ed., Modern American Poetry. Modern British Poetry (New York: Burlingame, 1958), 39.
9 a corkscrewing path: For a photograph, see Benzer, “Behavioral Mutants,” 25.
“Sometimes”: Ibid., 31.
Sturtevant had realized: A. H. Sturtevant, “The Use of Mosaics in the Study of the Developmental Effects of Genes,” Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Genetics (1932): 304–7.
10 They drew an oval map: A. Garcia-Bellido and J. R. Merriam, “Cell Lineage of the Imaginai Discs in Drosophila Gynandromorphs,” Journal of Experimental Zoology 170 (1969): 61–75.
Benzer and Hotta: Y. Hotta and S. Benzer, “Mapping of Behaviour in Drosophila Mosaics,” Nature 240 (1972): 527–35; Y. Hotta and S. Benzer, “Courtship in Drosophila Mosaics: Sex-specific Foci for Sequential Action Patterns,” Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences 73, no. 11 (1976): 4154–8.
“that was a sentimental thing”: Aspaturian interviews, 232.
fate maps to explore sexual instincts: Douglas R. Kankel and Jeffrey C. Hall, “Fate Mapping of Nervous System and Other Internal Tissues in Genetic Mosaics of Drosophila melanogaster,” Developmental Biology 48 (1976): 1–24; J. C. Hall, “Control of Male Reproductive Behavior by the Central Nervous System of Drosophila: Dissection of a Courtship Pathway by Genetic Mosaics,” Genetics 92 (1979): 437–57.
11 bithorax … Antennapedia: E. B. Lewis, “A Gene Complex Controlling Segmentation in Drosophila,” Nature 276 (1978): 565–70; E. B. Lewis, “Clusters of Master Control Genes Regulate the Development of Higher Organisms,” Journal of the American Medical Association 267 (1992): 1524–31.
12 “It is as if”: Christopher Wills, The Wisdom of the Genes (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 235.
13 The most surprising courtship mutant: K. S. Gill, “A Mutation Causing Abnormal Courtship and Mating Behavior in Male Drosophila melanogaster,” American Zoologist 3 (1963): 507.
CHAPTER TEN: FIRST MEMORY
1 “Memory is a passion”: Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 150.
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br /> 2 “inspiring spiritual atmosphere”: Stern, “Continuity of Genetics,” 906.
3 “Tell me”: W. Blake, “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” Portable Blake, 292. Blake goes on to ask, “Tell me where dwell the thoughts forgotten till thou call them forth?”
4 a famous memoir: A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist, Lynn Solotaroff, trans. (New York: Avon Books, 1969).
backward, forward, or even diagonally: Ibid., 17.
“I simply had to admit”: Ibid., 11.
5 read the Encyclopaedia Britannica: E. B. Lewis, “Remembering Sturtevant.” Genetics 41 (1995): 1227–30.
“For us to learn”: Yadin Dudai, The Neurobiology of Memory: Concepts, Findings, Trends (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3.
“a rope let down from heaven”: Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (New York: Random House, 1981) Vol. Ill: 912; quoted in Stephen S. Hall, “Our Memories, Ourselves,” The New York Times Magazine (February 15, 1998): 26.
6 “a looking-glass”: Locke, Human Understanding, Book 2, Chapter 1, Section 15, p. 65.
7 “little machines in a deep sleep”: V. G. Dethier, “Microscopic Brains,” Science 143 (1964): 1138–45. See also Dethier’s charming book To Know a Fly (San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1962).
“Can’t learn anything”: Howard Simons, “Scientist Finds Flies Can’t Learn But Moths and Bats Use Sonar,” Washington Post, April 28, 1966. “ ‘You name it and we’ve tried it,’ ” Dethier said dejectedly yesterday at the National Academy of Sciences. ‘But nothing works.’ Flies are incapable of learning. Now Dethier is trying caterpillars.”
8 “And at some level”: My description of Quinn’s early work comes from interviews with Quinn, Benzer, and colleagues, and from their first paper: William G. Quinn, William A. Harris, and Seymour Benzer, “Conditioned Behavior in Drosophila melanogaster,” Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences 71, no. 3 (1974): 708–12.
9 “A single experience”: Schrödinger, Mind and Matter, 102.
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