The Genetic Book of the Dead by Richard Dawkins review – the great biologist’s swansong

All things must pass, but some leave legacies. That is the story of life on Earth. Fossilised remains of organisms represent just one of the various treasure troves of information about how life used to be, one set of clues to why it is the way it is today. In the early 20th century, genes entered the storehouse of evidence for evolution, first as theoretical particles, later as the unit of selection, and today with molecular precision. Some 165 years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, evolution by natural selection is incontrovertible, the proof of it irrefutable and bounteous.

Richard Dawkins has done the lord’s work in sharing this radical idea for more than a third of that time, partly through research, but with wider impact in his general writing. This book, one of nearly a dozen he has written about evolution, looks set to be his last (he has called a tour to support it The Final Bow).

The “dead” of the title refers not to our long departed ancestors, whose ancient DNA scientists like me now scrutinise. Instead, it’s a metaphor for genes as artefacts of past organisms and their environments. As ever, Dawkins shines his light on the gene-centric view of evolution – it is not the individual, the population or even species that are the subject of selection, but these units of inheritance composed of DNA. He showcases the effects of nature’s genetic choices in mimicry, camouflage, predation, mating – all areas that have been very well covered elsewhere (not least by Dawkins himself). He does do it well, albeit with the tone of a Victorian gentleman naturalist. All life is in these pages, and by all, I mean almost exclusively cute animals, which make up a vanishingly tiny proportion of life on Earth, but have given us so many of the vital clues to the puzzle of evolution. Bower birds, horned lizards, naked mole rats, cuckoos, mossy frogs, owls and Tasmanian tigers and bears, oh my!

It’s rich throughout and even has pretty pictures. There is, however, an incongruous, score-settling chapter about the debate around the gene-centric view, which I think will be of interest to historians of science, but sits uncomfortably here – like a sore thumb, or in Dawkins’s crabby neologism in response to the fact that sore thumbs don’t stick out, “like a Golden Delicious in a bowl of genuinely delicious apples”. When the gene-centric view emerged, complexities followed, as they always do in biology, to the extent that we don’t all even agree on the definition of a gene. Dawkins plants himself like a tree and gives no quarter. This kind of discussion is highly typical of academia, but it’s a footnote in the story of evolution, and probably should be here too. At least the irascible atheist preacher is absent in these pages. Instead the author is in his element, celebrating the wonder of evolution. The style is Dawkins through and through: professorial, elegant bordering on pompous, reverential to the grandees of evolution.

It would be a lie to say I wasn’t profoundly influenced by his work from the 1980s: I consider The Blind Watchmaker to be his masterpiece, and The Extended Phenotype his best for a more specialised audience. These days, I tell students not to put Dawkins’s work on their personal statements, because if you want to study evolution, you ought to have read him – it is not impressive, it is necessary. But it was the more joyful work of Peter Medawar, Olivia Judson and most of all Steve Jones that compelled me to write about evolution myself – gritty and funny stories about people and families, where the ideas emerge from the bottom up – rather than Dawkins’s shtick: the inspirational public-school teacher for whom the British poetic canon is as important as Darwin (there is plenty of actual poetry in this book). It’s hard not to be aware of the differing backgrounds that gave rise to these two approaches, Jones working class and Welsh, Dawkins the Oxford don, a son of privilege.

This is a wonderful book in so many ways, but I didn’t love it, I think because my tastes in prose have evolved. It feels like the last instalment from a bygone era of grandiloquent science writing, one of which Dawkins was the doyen, the raconteur. It’s a greatest hits, or Dawkins by numbers, depending on your point of view.

If this is indeed Dawkins’s “swansong”, as he has hinted, then I don’t think many of us would mind too much if it was a Status Quo-style final tour that rolled on for a while yet, faithful to his obstinate advocacy for Darwin’s momentous idea. Ultimately, the fate of all organisms, according to the fixed laws of evolution, is extinction. But future scientists will surely study the words of Richard Dawkins long after he has succumbed to the forces he has done so much to celebrate.

• The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie by Richard Dawkins is published by Apollo (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.