When Nolan Ryan was asked to explain his remarkable longevity in the major leagues, he attributed it mostly to genetics. There is very little doubt that the genetic explanation of human behavior has returned with a vengeance, not only in scientific and semiscientific circles, but in the popular imagination as well. This renewed faith in genetics has emerged hand-in-hand with a new-found popular deification of DNA. New Age bookstores in San Francisco have begun offering music based on the frequency spectra of DNA molecules (raised by 35 octaves to be brought into the human audible range). A New York company has developed wind chimes from the same basis. In Paris, a biotechnology company has been offering Le Biopen with DNA-laced ink. The fifty-base sequence of DNA is specific to each bottle of ink and is kept secret by the company so that forgeries may be detected. A pen and a bottle of ink cost about $10,000, and several European and Japanese companies are said to be interested. To top it all, a California company plans to sell pieces of DNA – possibly encoding genes – cloned from pop idols including rock musicians and movie stars.

Though hereditarian thinking has consistently been part of the Western intellectual tradition for over two centuries, genetic explanations of human behavior last enjoyed this level of hegemony in the 1920s and 1930s, at the height of eugenic enthusiasm in the United States and Europe.