When scientists reported the discovery of the so-called gay gene in 1993, the ensuing debate was about more than what causes homosexuality. As many realized, the deeper issue was the very definition of what it means to be human. It suddenly seemed possible that we weren't the creatures of free will we thought we were. Perhaps we're just slaves to our genes.

Since then, driven in part by further advances in genetic research, a belief that genes control all human behavior and ability has swept the popular culture. Forget about nurture, in other words; it's all about nature. In an era when congeniality, criminal impulses, and IQ have all been linked to genes, biology rules.

'The sudden switch from a belief in nurture, in the form of social conditioning, to nature, in the form of genetics and brain physiology, is the great intellectual event . of the late 20th century,' writes Tom Wolfe in Forbes ASAP (Dec. 2, 1996). What Wolfe calls 'the neuroscientific view of life' has become 'the strategic high ground in the academic world, and the battle for it has already spread well beyond the scientific disciplines . into the general public. Both liberals and conservatives without a scientific bone in their bodies are busy trying to seize the terrain.'

The effort of the gay rights movement to make political hay of the gay-gene study is one example of this intellectual maneuvering, as is the controversial thinking of Bell Curve authors Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, who argued essentially that African Americans were genetically inferior to whites. But, while it has become popular to explain human behavior in genetic and biological terms, there are dissenters. The biblical creationists, for instance, reject all human-origin theories that contradict the Book of Genesis, including evolution. They, among others, believe that humans are more than just another animal, despite new genetic evidence to the contrary. In their view, we possess a special essence that's not inherited but divinely bestowed.

Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh, writing in The Nation (June 9, 1997), note that this argument is 'eerily similar' to a view now held by many academics, most of them leftists and feminists. The new 'secular creationists' argue that humans have no 'essential' nature that has been passed down genetically over time. We are, instead, creatures entirely shaped by cultural influences. In their eyes, this 'unique and miraculous freedom from biology' gives us a status' utterly different from and clearly 'above' that of all other living beings.'