Richard Dawkins’s latest crams gorgeous writing in an ill-fitting box
The spider-tailed horned viper uses its distinctive lure to trick birds into approaching
Matthijs Kuijpers/Alamy
The Genetic Book of the Dead
Richard Dawkins (Yale University Press (US, out now); Apollo (UK, 17 October))
The late, great evolutionary biologist William Hamilton apparently used to correspond on second-hand postcards, writing over the original script in different-coloured ink, sometimes at right angles. In The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian reverie, his colleague Richard Dawkins describes this as a kind of palimpsest – “a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing”. This, he says, is a…