Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior Book

The book quotes Sydney Brenner with 'I hold the somewhat weaker view that history does exist for the young, but is divided into two epochs: the past two years, and everything that went before' and I'm somewhat guilty of that, as I've never heard of Seymour Benzer before reading this book, even though I always thought to be somewhat interested in science history.

Which having missed that out really is a shame. Benzer was a physicist-turned-molecular biologist-turned-behavioral geneticist and has ties to Feynman, Crick, Sturtevant (of fame for working with TH Morgan) and Delbrück, to just name a few. He did some groundbreaking work on bacteriophages while roaming the molecular biology field, before moving into (and somewhat founding) the field of behavioral genetics, where he worked on mating behavior, circadian rhythms and learning abilities with fruit flies.

The book does a nice job of embedding Benzer into the greater context, along with the household names of the fields and how his work relates to it. So yes, you will read about Darwin, Mendel, Morgan, Watson/Crick et al. But in a way that illuminates the work of Benzer, which worked great for me. And of course you also will get the nature vs nurture debate, which probably isn't too surprising if you deal with behavioral genetics. That's another point where the book shows it age. It was published in a time where (at least based on my perception) the debate was pretty heavily on the nature-side of things, with people looking for "genes for X" even more than they do today. I would take those parts with a grain of salt.

Recommended for: anyone with at least a minimal interest in the history of science, people who love great scientific debates (if you're by now bored by "adaptionist vs neutralist evolution" and "inclusive fitness vs group selection" give this a try!)