The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie, Richard Dawkins, Jana Lenzová, Yale University Press, 2024, pp. 360, $22.00 hardcover.
An epistemic bubble is a social/philosophical network of like-minded individuals who are bound together by agreeing with one another. It is a very pleasant place to spend one’s days. Epistemic bubbles are, in a word, beautiful.
Scientists are not supposed to occupy epistemic bubbles. To the contrary, we are supposed to pop them at any opportunity. We are supposed to be open to contrary points of view, to welcome them, to engage them in open and even contentious debate, in the hope that somehow, something approaching scientific truth can be reached. It’s a myth, really. All scientists operate within one epistemic bubble or another. This is what Thomas Kuhn referred to as normal science.1 Communities of scientists are drawn to a beautiful model of nature, and organize their work around buffing it up. Contradictions may build up, but the model’s beauty is so compelling that the contradictions are not believed, until they build to the point that the bubble bursts. This is what Kuhn called a scientific revolution.
For as long as people have been thinking about the history of life on Earth, evolution has cycled through several epistemic bubbles. For about three centuries, natural theology was the biggest bubble, inflated by the beautiful idea that the wonders of living nature reflected the wisdom and omnipotence of the Creator. Legions of naturalists, from John Ray to Carolus Linnaeus to William Paley, built up a beautiful and coherent picture of living nature. Charles Darwin inhabited that bubble for a time until the contradictions became too great to ignore, until he and Alfred Russell Wallace popped it.
In doing so, Darwin and Wallace did not escape an epistemic bubble, but created their own. The beautiful beneficence of God was replaced by another beautiful idea, natural selection of “favored races,” as Darwin himself put it. Darwin’s epistemic creation grew through the late nineteenth century until it too was skewered on the sharp thorns of the emerging concept of the Mendelian gene. In the late 1920s, Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, and JBS Haldane patched the holes in Darwin’s bubble, but it was now inflated by another beautiful idea. It was no longer favored races that were selected naturally, but genes for fitness. The patch was enough to reinflate the Darwinian bubble anew, but now it was natural selection of genes that provided the pressure, what we call Neo-Darwinism. It is an idea as beautiful as the Newtonian clockwork of planetary motion.
If beauty sustains an epistemic bubble, Richard Dawkins is arguably the Michelangelo of Neo-Darwinism’s epistemic bubble. His first book, The Selfish Gene, was an eloquent exploration of the logic of gene selectionism, including his famous argument that organisms are mere vehicles for genes, and not the central players in the drama of evolution as naturalists, indeed Darwin himself, thought.2 Dawkins’ second book, The Extended Phenotype, took the logic of Neo-Darwinism outside the organism altogether. His most memorable device in that book was the meme, a mental equivalent of the selfish gene.3 Memes, like genes, acted as particles that could be inherited and therefore selected, but now were devices for a gene in one vehicle to control genes in other vehicles. Both books sparkled with originality, compelling logic, and beautiful writing. Both are classics in the history of Darwinian literature, both deservedly so. I was in graduate school when both books were released, and they drew me wholly into the Neo-Darwinist epistemic bubble. At the time, I had a girlfriend that accused me of loving Darwin more than I loved her. She was right.
Dawkins went on to write several more books. His 1986 The Blind Watchmaker explored the issue of biological design—why do organisms seem so well-contrived for life? At the time, I was becoming interested in that very issue, but from my own interest in physiology: how life works. The Blind Watchmaker still sparkled, but I thought it was physiologically naïve. A string of other books gradually took the bloom off the Dawkins rose for me. The last book of his I read was his 2008 The God Delusion.4 The schoolboy skepticism that permeated that book was an object lesson in scientism, the tendency of scientists to believe that success in one area of study qualifies them to comment intelligently in all areas, usually foolishly.
Even so, Dawkins is a gifted writer on topics I care about, so when his latest book The Genetic Book of the Dead, subtitled A Darwinian Reverie, came out, I looked forward to reading it, even if just for the beautiful prose. I won’t say I was disappointed. The Genetic Book of the Dead is a pleasure to read, enriched by Jana Lenzová’s illustrations. But where The God Delusion was an object lesson in scientism, The Genetic Book of the Dead is an object lesson of a different sort—about epistemic bubbles.
The Genetic Book of the Dead is a compilation of themes Dawkins has explored in depth throughout his career, but now with a novel hook: the genome as palimpsest, a text that has been continually “reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In the case of the genome, the text is the sequence of four nucleotides that make up a nucleic acid. In the case of DNA, the four letters are the abbreviated names of the nucleotides, A, C, G, and T. The sequence is copied with every cell division and every generation. At each stage, the original manuscript may be altered in some small fashion, with each revision copied in its turn. The layering of present genomes onto past genomes is the palimpsest, and the key to deciphering past meanings of the genetic texts.
Dawkins uses the palimpsest metaphor to underscore a compelling point: that the grand history of life on Earth is written on the genome/palimpsest, which can be deciphered by comparing the various genomes that exist today. So, for example, the whales are descended from the so-called even-toed ungulates, or artiodactyls, which include cattle, goats, camels, pigs, and peccaries. How, then, did such an improbable creature as a whale—fully aquatic sonar-using filter-feeders—arise from hoofed creatures that grazed on savanna grasslands, or wallowed in mires of mud?
Before the ability to read the text in DNA, morphology—body form—was the only available record evolutionists had. Compare the forms of all the living relatives of whales, note the similarities and differences, and infer the likely evolutionary family tree. Fossils of the ancestors of these creatures could fill in the unknown branches here and there. From all that, the best guess put the whales’ closest relatives with the pigs and peccaries. Peeling away the genetic palimpsest reveals, rather, that it is the hippopotami that are whales’ closest evolutionary relatives. Such are the surprising things that reading the genome as a palimpsest can reveal.
The Genetic Book of the Dead is full of fascinating examples of such discoveries to be found in the genome/palimpsest. Readers, particularly those captivated by the endlessly fascinating diversity of life itself will find a rich read in this book, as Dawkins’ books generally are.
The book’s biggest weakness is that Dawkins doesn’t stick with the genome/palimpsest metaphor. The remarkable development of DNA sequencing technology has now made the genome a readable record of evolutionary history. Building an evolutionary family tree need no longer depend upon subjective judgements of curvature of bones. Now, it can be read in objective records of nucleotide sequences. About halfway through the book, though, Dawkins abandons this interesting concept for a nostalgia tour of past hits. The selfish gene comes back, as does the extended phenotype, and the meme. The blind watchmaker strides showily back onto the stage. It’s the ultimate tribute show.
Which brings me back to those epistemic bubbles. The Neo-Darwinist bubble is kept inflated by a concept of the gene as determinant of function, and there Dawkins is on far shakier ground. We no longer have a clear picture for just how nucleotide sequence translates into function, nor do we have any longer a clear understanding of what the gene is, or even if the gene exists at all.
None of that can be allowed to intrude on the beautiful serenity of life within the Neo Darwinian bubble, where the world makes perfect sense, everything is coherent, sensible, and beautiful. If there is a trait, there is a gene for it: there has to be, and if there isn’t, we just make one up. If there is a gene for hair growth in mammals, hairlessness has to be explained by natural selection silencing it. We are told gratuitously that this poses a “problem for creationists.” If any creationist has ever weighed in on hairlessness in mammals, I am not aware of it. Dolphins bear a striking resemblance to ichthyosaurs (convergent evolution, to use the technical phrase) because natural selection on ichthyosaur genes had a great deal in common with selection on dolphin genes. And so, the interior walls of the Darwinian bubble come to be decorated with triumphant portrait after triumphant portrait of questions pondered and answered.
From outside the bubble, though, things don’t look quite so convincing. Unacknowledged and unresolved tautologies litter the pages like confetti. If cichlid fishes in the African great lakes are incredibly species-rich, it has to be because natural selection has favored rapid speciation. Vast complexities are papered over by omnipotent natural selection. How do ichthyosaur genes form a streamlined ichthyosaur body, and how does a distantly-related dolphin genome form a similarly streamlined dolphin body? Don’t ask, it just does. New metaphors spring up like dandelions providing ground cover to an ugly patch of rocky terrain. Genes “know” what to do, because genes “see” their environments, and “collaborate” with other genes to shape bodies and genomes. Dawkins thus paints himself into corner after corner, conferring a cognitive power on DNA molecules that they simply do not have, except through the organisms they inhabit. Natural selection is granted agency that rivals the hand of the creator God.
From within the Darwinian bubble, such quandaries are not quandaries at all, because gene selection can explain everything, if not now, definitely in the future. There is no need to entertain ideas that may pop up from outside the bubble: we already have a full and satisfying explanation, even if we haven’t quite nailed it down yet.
A favorite example of this tendency was Dawkins’ discussion of the singing burrows of mole crickets, which I have also written about.5 Male mole crickets, like other crickets, sing to attract mates. Mole crickets also sing from a self-constructed burrow that is shaped like a trumpet horn. Like the clear tones coming out of a trumpet, this shape allows the male cricket to tune and project its song over a greater distance, and hence to more females than it could without it. Dawkins offers a pat Darwinian explanation for this remarkable ability: “There must be genes controlling horn shape, just as there are genes controlling wing shape or antenna shape.” Natural selection has therefore shaped those genes into their expressed perfection of burrows shaped like a trumpet horn. Voila, the sheer power of gene selection!
In fact, the mole cricket’s burrow is a compelling example of just the opposite. Creating or seeking calling platforms that enhance song is a common habit among crickets. Even sitting on a broad leaf can do the trick. Cutting a hole in the leaf can also help. Are there genes for this? Perhaps, but the whole story cuts the rug out from under that glib explanation.
Mole crickets shape their burrows into exponential horns because the cricket “tunes” its burrow.6 It digs an initial burrow, emits a test chirp, listens, and if the chirp he hears is not to his liking, he adjusts the burrow shape, tests again, and so on, until the burrow’s shape converges on the signal the cricket “wants” to hear. My wording is deliberate, not metaphorical, because it frames the essential question of evolution today. Has the mole cricket’s remarkable burrow been driven to its state of perfection by impersonal selection of “exponential horn burrow genes” specifying its perfect shape? Or have the mole cricket’s genes been dragged along in the wake of the mole cricket’s wants and desires in shaping its singing burrow? From within the Darwinian bubble, the first is the only possible explanation, and the second impossible even to entertain.
To those who are permanent residents of the Darwinian epistemic bubble, The Genetic Book of the Dead will be an eloquent defense of the Darwinian faith. It will be seen as eloquent because it is internally coherent and therefore beautiful. To those who found themselves, as I have, on the outside of the Darwinian bubble, The Genetic Book of the Dead will jar the eye and mind, like watching a beautiful ballerina whose tutu has slipped to her knees.
J. Scott Turner is Emeritus Professor of Biology, SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry & Director of Science Programs, National Association of Scholars. He last appeared in AQ in the fall of 2024 issue with “American Lysenko,” his review of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci.
1 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1971).
2 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
3 Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (Oxford: W H Freeman & Co., 1982).
4 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).
5 J. Scott Turner, The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2000).
6 H. C. Bennet-Clark, The Tuned Singing Burrow of Mole Crickets, Journal of Experimental Biology 128 (1987): 383-411.
Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash
