"A new perspective on natural selection as a means to explore the past."
Sometimes science will make discoveries that change the world, but sometimes it is just about how we look at those big leaps forward. In his latest landmark work, The Genetic Book of the Dead, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins holds Darwinism to the light and reveals the potential of natural selection to not only explain how creatures look and behave the way that they do in order to survive in their environments, but also to explain past environments, distant kingdoms, and use anatomy and cellular biology to explain these unseen landscapes.
Every book marks a moment in time, when all within its pages is determined by what has gone before. That is not to say they cannot predict the future but there is always an element of gambling within, for example, science fiction. Dawkins argues that the same is true of all life forms, that they are in essence books which can be picked apart to explain the past. His prediction is that this will be a key tool to the scientist of the future who will use genomics to not only understand a new species, for instance, but as a means to uncover information about the worlds that its ancestors inhabited.
The Genetic Book of the Dead is packed with examples and illustrated by Jana Lenzová in a way that serves to make this deeply complex idea very accessible. And this is Dawkins' skill - he is a brilliant communicator of science who not only breaks ground in terms of concepts, but creates arguments and devices to take those concepts to mass audiences, as previously with The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene. You may not emerge a complete expert on niches such as palimpsests or convergent evolution but this book will certainly equip you to explore the idea that DNA can not only map ancestry, but can expand our knowledge of the history of the planet itself.
| Primary Genre | Popular Science |
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From one of the world's great science writers, a book that explores the deepest principles of evolutionary history.
In this groundbreaking new approach to the evolution of all life, Richard Dawkins shows how the body, behaviour, and genes of every living creature can be read as a book - an archive of the worlds of its ancestors. A perfectly camouflaged desert lizard has a desiccated landscape of sand and stones 'painted' on its back. Its skin can be read as a description of ancient deserts in which its ancestors survived - and, before that, of the worlds of its more remote ancestors: a genetic book of the dead.
But such descriptions are more than skin-deep. The fine chisels of Darwinian natural selection carve their way through the very warp and woof of the body, into every biochemical nook and corner, into every cell of every living creature. A zoologist of the future, presented with a hitherto-unknown animal, will be able to reconstruct the worlds that shaped its ancestors, to read its unique 'book of the dead'.
The book is filled with fascinating examples of the power of Darwinian natural selection to build exquisite perfection, paradoxically accompanied by what look like gross blunders. Along the way, Dawkins dismantles influential criticisms of the 'gene's-eye-view' of life. And, to end with a provocative sting in the tail, the author asks there is a sense in which all our 'own' genes can be seen as a gigantic colony of cooperating viruses?
From the author of The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale comes a revolutionary, richly illustrated book that unlocks the door to an ancient past, seen through wholly new eyes.
The Genetic Book of the Dead features in the following genres: Non-Fiction Books of the Month, Popular Science, Evolution, Genetics (non-medical), Zoology and animal sciences, Science: general issues, Popular Science, Mathematics and Science, Science: general issues, Biology, life sciences, Life sciences: general issues, Evolution, Genetics (non-medical), Zoology and animal sciences
The Genetic Book of the Dead is available in Paperback, Hardback
The Genetic Book of the Dead was written by Richard Dawkins and published by Apollo an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)
The Genetic Book of the Dead has 351 pages
