The Genetic Book of the Dead

LoveReading Says

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.

Greg Hackett

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