For all species, including our own, the true figure of life is a perching bird, a passerine, alert and nervous in every part, ready to dart off in an… - Jonathan Weiner

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 contempt for cant, a delight in common sense, combined with uncommon curiosity about what is really there.

The pamphlet teaches the skills that skills that Benzer’s former labmates would now need to learn, including propaganda, “that branch of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.”

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.