""The London Review of Books" called it "an unintentionally hilarious emulsion of bombast and bathos", "The Washington Post" described it as "part lecture, part satire and mostly freak show", and Dave Itzkoff in "The New York Times"′s Sunday Book Review called it "a barrage of truths, half-truths and untruths".Award-winning science journalist Matt Ridley, writing in "The Wall Street Journal", often could not spot the boundary between fact and fiction in the scientific aspects, although he found the almost immediate effects of the "maturity" gene implausible.