Richard Dawkins’s latest crams gorgeous writing in an ill-fitting box

Life

A new book from the science-writing legend is an Attenborough-esque romp through some of the wonders of the natural world. Just beware the title’s misfiring metaphor

By Graham Lawton

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…

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