In the end, perhaps what's most enlightening, and depressing, about Ridley is how willing he is to limit his obvious intellectual capacities in the service of his ideological predilections. In the preface he asserts, "I genuinely believe that we are living through the greatest intellectual moment in history." Yet when he surveys the meaning of this moment, it requires no adjustment of his mind-set -- instead it all uncannily mirrors what he already believes.

The left sees the genome as confirming its views just as readily as the right does. You can't find a better example of this than the curmudgeonly brilliance of Richard Lewontin, Aggasiz Research Professor at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and longtime opponent of genetic determinism. Lewontin is one of the central objects of scorn for Ridley and his ilk, who loathe anyone who challenges their vision of the perfect alignment of genetics and capitalism or questions a sociobiology that proves that people like them are born to run the world.

No one has questioned and belittled the potential of the Human Genome Project as persistently as Lewontin has. Equally famed as a geneticist and for his neo-Marxist approach to science (titles of his earlier works include "The Dialectical Biologist" and "Not in Our Genes"), Lewontin has repeatedly argued that biology is a lot more complicated than the A, T, C and G nucleotides of DNA and, further, that many important realities of our social lives can't be found there. "They still haven't found the gene for unemployment," Lewontin sarcastically told me in an interview about the genome project several years ago.

In his latest book, "The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment" (based on a series of three lectures with an added final chapter), Lewontin lays out his position with devastating clarity; the science in the book should be accessible to most laypersons. However much our DNA may tell us about individual diseases, he says, ultimately reductionism provides a simplified and therefore false picture of both the interactions between the genes of any cell and the other parts of the cell and the interactions between a cell and all the other cells of an organism. By extension, that false picture also undermines a true understanding of any organism's interaction with its environment.

Lewontin says that all biologists know this to be the case, but are rewarded for pursuing scientific investigations as if it were otherwise. Dangerously, "science as we practice it solves those problems for which its methods and concepts are adequate, and successful scientists soon learn to pose only those problems that are likely to be solved. Pointing to their undoubted successes in dealing with the relatively easy problems, they then assure us that eventually the same methods will triumph over the harder ones. If the determination of DNA sequence has solved the problem of how information about protein structure is stored in the cell, then surely the determination of the structure of some molecules, perhaps even DNA itself, will solve the problem of how information about social structure is stored in the brain."

The argument is not against genetic reductionism per se, he says. Sometimes parts of the genome are causal elements, sometimes they're not, "depending upon which genetic differences in which species living in which circumstances are considered. There are no universal rules for cutting up organisms," he informs us. Just as during the recent election Americans were educated about the differences in the election laws among the 50 states, Lewontin writes, "so too in biology, it depends upon the jurisdiction."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"