I just finished Richard Dawkins’ 2024 book “The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie”.
Another great book. Dawkins rarely misses, although the older I get the more I want a tl;dr. This was a shorter book of his, but it felt a little repetitive and a little long.
Anyway, the premise is that you can look at the genes of something alive as a snapshot of what the pressures of its evolutionary past look like. From the genes, we could reconstruct the environment that shaped the current instance of the creature or plant or whatever you.
A great way of looking at evolution.
Here’s a summary from deepseek:
Genetic Book of the Dead by Richard Dawkins explores the idea that an organism’s genome serves as a coded record of its evolutionary past, effectively acting as a “book of the dead” that documents the ancestral environments and survival challenges it has faced. Dawkins argues that by decoding DNA, scientists can reconstruct the historical pressures that shaped a species, revealing how natural selection has fine-tuned traits over generations. The book blends evolutionary biology with imaginative speculation, suggesting that genes carry a hidden narrative of life’s struggles and adaptations, offering profound insights into the interconnectedness of all living things. Through this lens, Dawkins presents the genome not just as a blueprint for life but as a dynamic archive of evolutionary history.
Another notion is that the genes are an attempt to guess the future for the individual. A population of individuals is a population of slightly different guesses about the future environment, some of which will be better guesses than others.
Another nice insight.
It’s always a pleasure to read Dawkins.
It also reminds me of discovering the idea of adaptive radiations during my Masters and falling in love with speciation and population ecology and all of that.
I re-read The Selfish Gene this year and felt it to be a slog. I probably read it first 20+ years ago when I had more energy. It was too dense (boring?) this time around. I was thinking of trying a re-read of the The Blind Watchmaker sometime soon.
I might start with Dawkins’ autobiography An Appetite for Wonder.