All three spoke in the kind of down-home, common-as-flies style that is the lingua franca of great scientists, conveying a contempt for pretension, a… - Jonathan Weiner

With the discovery of the clock gene, the sense of time, mysterious for so many centuries, was no longer a mystery that could be observed only from the outside. Now it could be explored as a mechanism from the inside. The discovery implied that behavior itself could now be charted and mapped as precisely as any other aspect of inheritance. Qualities that people had always thought of as somehow floating above the body, apart from the body, as if they belonged to the realm of the spirit and not of the flesh, as if they were supernatural, might be mapped right alongside qualities as mundane as eye pigment.

Evolution discloses a meaning in death, although the meaning is like some of the berries that Darwin tasted in the Galapagos, “acid & Austere.” There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. Even Drought bears fruit. Even death is a seed.

Watson sighs. “So in that sense you don’t have a free will. Your reactions are programmed. You know, you start asking the difference,” he says with a nod toward the Fly Room next door. “What free will is there in Drosophila? You put the question of the free will of a fly. And what’s really different about the fly’s brain from ours—which gives us free will?
“I’m sure once we know how the brain works, we’ll no longer talk about free will in the Jesuit sense. It will cease to be, you know—” Freedom will cease to be a mystery requiring Jesuitical debate; it will cease to be a theological or philosophical question. “It will just be how the brain works. You will describe how the brain works. You won’t use the words ‘free will’; you know, you’ll understand…. Because you’re asking, how does the brain work?” He says in a softer voice. “That’s what you’re really asking.” The bell in the double-helical bell tower outside his office window begins to toll. “And that’s really the ultimate question to ask,” he says.