The Genetic Book of the Dead
A Darwinian Reverie
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
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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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Studying animals' adaptations and genetic makeup reveals insights about the historical environments they evolved in, according to this astute study. Evolutionary biologist Dawkins (Flights of Fancy) suggests that the geometrid stick caterpillar looks like "a detailed description of ancient twigs" and that the stout potoo bird, whose brown plumage resembles tree bark, is "a perfect model of long-forgotten stumps." This kind of analysis can be applied to more ambitious reconstructions of evolutionary history, Dawkins contends. For instance, he describes how scientists deduced that an ancient turtle species had likely lived on land before returning to the water from the fact that the reptiles had bodily dimensions that more closely resembled modern tortoises than sea turtles, but developed armored breastplates before back shells, indicating that their predators usually struck from below and were thus aquatic. Dawkins also notes that humans have vestigial, unexpressed genes that, if activated, would greatly enhance the species' olfactory senses. The author's talent for rendering complex concepts in lucid prose remains intact, though he spends much of the latter half of the book rehashing arguments he made in The Selfish Gene about how genes "cause (in a statistical sense) their own survival" by conferring advantages to the bodies they inhabit. Though this covers some familiar ground, it's still worth checking out. Illus.
