
The horned spider-tail viper uses its distinctive attraction to trick birds into approaching
Matthijs Kuijpers/Alay
Genetic Book of the Dead
Richard Dawkins (Yale University Press (USA, out now); Apollo (UK, October 17))
The late evolutionary biologist William Hamilton apparently wrote on second-hand postcards, writing in different colored ink over the original script, sometimes at right angles. In The genetic book of the dead: a Darwinian nightmarehis colleague Richard Dawkins describes it as a kind of palimpsest: “a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (erased) writing.” This, he says,…