Darwin and Dawkins: a tale of two biologists

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Genetic Book of the Dead. By Richard Dawkins.

Yale University Press; 360 pages; $35. Apollo; £25 Go to any bookshop, and its shelves will be groaning with works of popular science: titles promising to explain black holes, white holes, the brain or the gut to the uninitiated. Yet the notion that a science book could be a blockbuster is a relatively recent one.

Publishers and curious readers have Richard Dawkins to thank. In 1976 his book “The Selfish Gene"—which argued that natural selection at the level of the gene is the driver of evolution—became a surprise bestseller. It expressed wonder at the variety of the living world and offered a disciplined attempt to explain it.

It also announced Dr Dawkins, then 35, as a public intellectual. A spate of books about evolution followed, as well as full-throated attacks on religion, particularly its creationist aspects. (In one essay he contemplated religion as a kind of “mind virus".) Dr Dawkins earned the sobriquet “Darwin’s rottweiler"—a nod to Thomas Huxley, an early defender of the naturalist’s ideas, known as “Darwin’s bulldog".

Dr Dawkins, now 83, has returned with his 19th volume, “The Genetic Book of the Dead". Its working hypothesis is that modern organisms are, indeed, like books, but of a particular, peculiar, variety. Dr Dawkins uses the analogy of palimpsests: the parchments scraped and reused by medieval scribes that accidentally preserved enough traces of their previous content for the older text to be discerned.