Keller isn't a great stylist, but does a good job of covering the complex topic of genetics in a manner that is comprehensible for the non-scientist reader. Since I'm reading this book a dozen years after it was first published (2000), I am certain that much of what she reports here has been superseded by new research & thinking in the field. I am curious about that, in the same way that I'm curious about developments in cosmology post String Theory, for example. I suffer from a perpetual outdatedness exacerbated by the primitive notions about science that were inculcated in me during 12 years of Catholic education back in the 50s and 60s. Such primary instruction so often intrudes and blocks new learning (what I know about American History suffers from the same distortion). One of the more intriguing notions that I've come away with after reading The Century of the Gene is that the gene is not a thing, but a complex web of functional, regulatory & developmental processes; "What then should we count as the beginning and end of a gene?" Another is the possibility that "mechanisms for evolvability could themselves have evolved" which would be "a serious provocation for neo-Darwinian theory, for it carries the heretical implication that organisms provide not just the passive substrate of evolution but their own motors for change; it suggests that they have become equipped with a kind of agency in their own evolution." ( )