Zeta Woof

As humankind becomes more technologically sophisticated, identity becomes both more fluid and more fixed. People can more readily concoct their own personas, mixing and matching elements they find on the Internet; meanwhile, genetics pins us ever tighter to our own heredity. The resultant confusion spills over into a host of subjects: ethnic profiling, affirmative action, religious identity tests, the complex of issues summed up in Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's "The Bell Curve." All reliably provoke temper tantrums, red-faced accusations and wounded feelings. Conservatives are more often lambasted for their views than liberals, but liberals are no less prone to the fantastic and illogical. Mr. Wheelwright, the former science editor of Life magazine, tiptoes with impressive agility through the minefield; this is one of the rare books on this vexed subject that get the technical stuff right—and that understand that people make what they will of scientific findings.