Darwin and Dawkins: a tale of two biologists

Go to any bookshop, and its shelves will be groaning with works of popular science: titles promising 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 a relatively recent one. Publishers and curious readers have Richard Dawkins to thank.

In 1976 his book “The Selfish Gene"—which argued that natural selection at the level of the gene is the driver of evolution—became a surprise bestseller. It expressed wonder at the variety of the living world and offered a disciplined attempt to explain it. It also announced Dr Dawkins, then 35, as a public intellectual.

A spate of books about evolution followed, as well as full-throated attacks on religion, particularly its creationist aspects. (In one essay he contemplated religion as a kind of “mind virus".) Dr Dawkins earned the sobriquet “Darwin’s rottweiler"—a nod to Thomas Huxley, an early defender of the naturalist’s ideas, known as “Darwin’s bulldog".

Dr Dawkins, now 83, has returned with his 19th volume, “The Genetic Book of the Dead". Its working hypothesis is that modern organisms are, indeed, like books, but of a particular, peculiar, variety. Dr Dawkins uses the analogy of palimpsests: the parchments scraped and reused by medieval scribes that accidentally preserved enough traces of their previous content for the older text to be discerned.

At the moment, only fragments of the overwritten messages of these biological palimpsests can be parsed. A human genome, for example, contains many “pseudogenes" that once encoded proteins related to the sense of smell, but which have now been disabled because, presumably, they are no longer needed in an animal whose dominant sense is vision. Similarly (and more familiarly), a human spine’s ancestral role as a suspension bridge from which the body hangs, rather than as a pillar that holds it upright, is clear from the compromises in its modern structure.

Dr Dawkins’s contention is that, by proper scrutiny of genetics and anatomy, a scientist armed with the tools of the future will be able to draw far more sophisticated and connected inferences than these. This will then illuminate parts of evolutionary history that are currently invisible.

As an analogy, describing organisms as palimpsests is a bit of a stretch. A palimpsest’s original text is unrelated to its new one, rather than being an earlier version of it, so it can tell you nothing about how the later text was composed. But that quibble aside, the tantalising idea is that reading genomes for their history is an endeavour that may form the basis of a new science.

Having introduced this thought, Dr Dawkins gets back to basics. As in 1976, the book’s unifying principle is that genes are the sole units of selection. Some biologists have made careers out of forgetting this, Dr Dawkins implies. For this reason he takes aim at his old, late rival Stephen Jay Gould (“whose errors were consistently masked by the graceful eloquence with which he expressed them"), and Denis Noble, a venerable physiologist who was, back in the 1960s, his doctoral examiner.

Both these men have argued that evolution takes place at many levels other than genes. Gould, a palaeontologist, focused on the grand sweep—competition between entire taxonomic groups (species, families and so on) over the course of geological history. Dr Noble sees it in an organism’s details. DNA , he suggests, is nothing special: like cells or organs, genes are merely part of a greater whole. But a moment’s thought shows both of these views are wrong. It is changes in DNA, and DNA alone, that are the mechanism of intergenerational change, and thus of evolution. Effects at any other level are mere leverage on, or consequences of, this process.

After 19 books and almost 50 years spent contemplating essentially the same theme, lesser authors would be forgiven for getting stale. But, though Dr Dawkins’s topic is unchanging, his approach is always fresh, thanks to new examples and research. Yet he calls his current book tour “The Final Bow", suggesting that he is exhausted, even if his subject is not.

Dr Dawkins has been an influential figure as much as an important thinker. In the current age, when academics and students are fearful of expressing even slightly controversial opinions, the world needs public intellectuals who are willing to tell it, politely but persuasively, how it is. Dr Dawkins has long been happy to challenge his readers’ orthodoxies (even if he has mellowed on the subject of faith, and refers to himself as a “cultural Christian"). Popular science writers today could take note.

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