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

The average rating for Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-09-18 00:00:00 May Hegarty What happens when you put lots of drunk male fruit flies together in a bottle. Gay fruit fly sex, of course! Enjoyable, well written, thought provoking with many details that I will probably forget. This history of behavioral genetics is primarily presented as professional biography Seymour Benzer, a scientist who rejected the more lucrative field of solid state electronics to study the behavior of fruit flies. Benzer comes off as a part quirky professor, part inventive genius, and truly driven by the love (?, is that right) of his chosen field. The title comes from reducing behavioral genetics into three essential components - time, love and memory. Time - we learn how the notion of clocks are built into our DNA Love - more like mating patterns, but ok. Memory - not just memory, but the ability to learn and change behavior because of it Behavior is complex and understanding it is difficult. There is quite a bit written about the experimental approaches used and how behavior was broken down. Aside from the science, you learn some charming quirks that brings back memories of reading The Double Helix in high school (man those guys played a lot of tennis!). There are many featured players, including Watson and Crick of DNA structure fame. Most important, it dances around the question of nature versus nurture. No conclusions are given, and as this was written 15 years ago, if any were they would probably be OBE by now.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-10-07 00:00:00 Aaron Stillwell 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!)