AAll things must pass, but some leave legacies. This is the story of life on earth. Fossilized remains of organisms represent just one of several treasure troves of information about what life used to be like, one set of clues about why it is the way it is today. In the early 20th century, genes entered the storehouse of evidence for evolution, first as theoretical particles, later as the unit of selection, and today with molecular precision. Some 165 years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, evolution by natural selection is indisputable, its evidence irrefutable and abundant.
Richard Dawkins has been doing the Lord’s work in sharing this radical idea for more than a third of that time, partly through research but with wider impact in his general writing. This book, one of nearly a dozen he wrote on evolution, appears to be his last (he called a tour to support it The final arc).
The “dead” of the title do not refer to our long-dead ancestors, whose ancient DNA scientists like myself are now scrutinizing. Instead, it is a metaphor for genes as artifacts of past organisms and their environments. As always, Dawkins shines his light on the genecentric view of evolution – it is not the individual, the population or even species that is the subject of selection, but these units of inheritance composed of DNA. He shows the effects of nature’s genetic choices in imitation, camouflage, predation, mating – all areas that are very well covered elsewhere (not least by Dawkins himself). He does it well, albeit with the tone of a Victorian gentleman physicist. All life is in these pages, and by all I mean almost exclusively cute animals, which make up a vanishingly small part of life on Earth, but have given us so many of the important clues to the puzzle of evolution. Boring birds, horned lizards, naked mole rats, cuckoos, moss frogs, owls and Tasmanian tigers and bears, oh my!
It is rich throughout and even has beautiful pictures. However, there is an incongruous, seminal chapter on the debate surrounding the genecentric view, which I think will be of interest to historians of science, but sits uncomfortably here – like a sore thumb, or in Dawkins’s crass neologism in response to the fact that sore thumbs not sticking out, “like a Golden Delicious in a bowl of truly delicious apples”. When the gene-centric view emerged, complexities followed, as they always do in biology, to the extent that we do not all agree on the definition of a gene. Dawkins plants himself like a tree and gives no quarter. This kind of discussion is highly typical of academia, but it is a footnote in the story of evolution, and probably should be here as well. At least the angry atheist preacher is absent from these pages. Instead, the author is in his element, celebrating the wonder of evolution. The style is through and through Dawkins: professorial, elegant bordering on pompous, deferential to the greats of evolution.
It would be a lie to say I wasn’t deeply influenced by his work from the 1980s: I consider The Blind Watchmaker to be his masterpiece, and The extended phenotype its best for a more specialized audience. These days I tell students not to put Dawkins’ work on their personal statements because if you want to study evolution, should read him – it’s not impressive, it’s necessary. But it was the more joyous work of Peter Medawar, Olivia Judson and above all Steve Jones that compelled me to write about evolution myself – funny and funny stories about people and families, where the ideas emerge from the bottom – rather than Dawkins ‘s bullshit. : the inspirational public school teacher to whom the British poetic canon is as important as Darwin (there is a lot of actual poetry in this book). It is hard not to be aware of the different backgrounds that gave rise to these two approaches, Jones working class and Welsh, Dawkins the Oxford don, a son of privilege.
This is a great book in so many ways, but I didn’t love it, I think because my taste in prose has evolved. It feels like the last installment from a bygone era of great science writing, of which Dawkins was the doyen, the raconteur. It’s a greatest hit, or Dawkins by the numbers, depending on your point of view.
If this is indeed Dawkins’ “swan song”, as he implied, then I don’t think many of us would mind too much if it was a Status Quo-style final tour that went on for a while longer, true to his persistent advocacy. for Darwin’s important idea. Ultimately, the fate of all organisms, according to the fixed laws of evolution, is extinction. But future scientists will surely study the words of Richard Dawkins long after he had succumbed to the forces he had done so much to celebrate.
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