Visit any bookstore, and its shelves will be groaning with works of popular science: titles that promise 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 relatively recent. Publishers and curious readers have Richard Dawkins to thank.
In 1976 his book “The Selfish Gene” – which argued that natural selection at the gene level is the driver of evolution – became a surprise bestseller. It expressed wonder at the diversity of the living world and made a disciplined effort to explain it. It declared Dr. Dawkins, then 35, a public intellectual.
What followed was a flood of books about evolution, as well as vigorous attacks on religion, especially its creationist aspects. (In one essay he viewed religion as a kind of “virus of the mind.”) Dr. Dawkins earned the nickname “Darwin’s Rottweiler”—a nod to Thomas Huxley, an early defender of naturalist ideas, who was Was called “Darwin’s Bulldog”.
Dr. Dawkins, now 83, is back with his 19th volume, “The Genetic Book of the Dead.” Its working hypothesis is that modern organisms are, indeed, like those in books, but of a special, strange, variety. Dr. Dawkins uses the analogy of palimpsests: parchments scraped and reused by medieval scribes who accidentally preserved enough traces of their previous content to decipher the older text.
At present, only fragments of the overwritten messages of these biological palimpsests can be parsed. For example, a human genome contains several “pseudogenes” that once encoded proteins related to the sense of smell, but have now been disabled because, presumably, they are no longer needed in the animal whose dominant Feeling is vision. Similarly (and more familiarly), the ancestral role of a human spine was as a suspension bridge from which the body hangs, rather than as a pillar that holds it upright, as evidenced by compromises in its modern structure. Is.
Dr. Dawkins’s argument is that, by proper investigation of genetics and anatomy, a scientist equipped with the tools of the future will be able to draw much more sophisticated and connected conclusions than these. This will then shed light on parts of evolutionary history that are currently invisible.
By way of analogy, it is a bit difficult to describe organisms as palimpsests. The original text of a palimpsest is unrelated to the new text, rather than being an older version of it, so it cannot tell you anything about how the later text was composed. But leaving this controversy aside, the interesting idea is that reading genomes for their history is an effort that could form the basis of a new science.
After presenting this idea, Dr. Dawkins gets back to basics. As in 1976, the unifying principle of the book is that genes are the sole unit of selection. Dr. Dawkins believes that some biologists have made their career by forgetting this. For this reason he takes aim at his old, late rivals Stephen Jay Gould (“whose errors were constantly obscured by the beautiful eloquence with which they were expressed”) and Dennis Noble, a respected physiologist who in the 1960s Are. Doctoral Examiner.
Both of these men argued that evolution occurs at many levels other than genes. Gould, a paleontologist, focused on the grand sweep—competition between entire taxonomic groups (species, families, and so on) throughout geological history. Dr. Noble sees this in the description of an organism. They suggest that DNA is nothing special: like cells or organs, genes are just parts of a larger whole. But a moment’s thought shows that both these views are wrong. It is changes in DNA, and DNA alone, that are the mechanism of inter-generational change and thus evolution. Effects at any other level are merely a benefit or result of this process.
After 19 books and nearly 50 years of musing on essentially the same subject, lesser writers would be forgiven for growing stale. But, although Dr. Dawkins’ topic remains unchanged, his perspective is always fresh due to new examples and research. Yet he calls his current book tour “The Final Bow,” which suggests he’s tired, even if his subject isn’t tired.
Dr. Dawkins has been an influential person as well as an important thinker. In the current era, when academics and students are afraid to express even the slightest controversial opinion, the world needs public intellectuals who are willing to politely but persuasively tell it like it is. Dr. Dawkins has long delighted in challenging the stereotypes of his readers (even if he has been soft on the subject of faith, and refers to himself as a “cultural Christian”). Today’s popular science writers may take note.
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