Richard Dawkins is a pre-eminent and influential broad-audience scientific writer. With the runaway success of his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, followed by The Extended Phenotype (1982) and The Blind Watchmaker (1986), his achievements were recognised by his appointment as the inaugural Professor for the Public Understanding of Science in 1995 at Oxford. A steady stream of books and documentaries promoting rational, scientific, and evolutionary thought have been released ever since. The Selfish Gene has remained a bestseller for over forty years, selling over a million copies and translated into twenty-five languages. The breadth of Dawkins’s cultural influence is exemplified by his concept of a ‘meme’ to describe a parallel mechanism for the replication of ideas, itself becoming a meme, replicating and evolving through online popular culture. More significantly, Dawkins’s books inspired generations of biologists in their work, before the fields of genomics and genetics were even fully established, by centring genes as the dominant player in evolution.

Dawkins’s latest contribution, at the age of eighty-three, is The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian reverie. Like a well-seasoned performer, Dawkins reprises many of the themes of his earlier books but overlays this framework with new material, developments, and advances to bring us up to date with ever-expanding and developing fields.

Evolutionary genetics has come of age in the forty-nine years since The Selfish Gene was published and it is timely to recap on developments in the field. The notion that science delivers its great insights in sudden revelations and discoveries may have, as Dawkins once said of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, been ‘oversold by some journalists’. New scientific fields take time to mature and develop, and it is only now that the field of genetics is starting to deliver on its early promises, separating into specialities, fulfilling and even exceeding some expectations, to the point where genetic patterns might be able to tell us directly about the past worlds in which organisms evolved.

It is this opportunity that Dawkins wants us to think about. The book’s blurb tells us that this is a ‘groundbreaking new approach’, allowing a ‘zoologist of the future, presented with a hitherto-unknown animal, to reconstruct the worlds that shaped its ancestors’. For a book about the past, its message is very much directed to the ‘scientist of the future’. Reminiscent of Cuvier’s powerfully predictive ‘correlation of anatomical parts’ and modern comparative biological approaches, Dawkins’s thesis may not be entirely new, but there is no doubt that genetics might reveal much about species’ responses to past environments that has previously been hidden. The question is how well can we read our genes and just how much ‘rubbish’ do we have to sift through to find the important information?

Despite Dawkins’s devotion to genes, he seems to draw heavily on his ethological heritage, looking into phenotypes, rather than just genotypes, to flesh out how each organism’s evolutionary history is recorded and displayed. Sometimes it is much easier to read the structures and functions directly rather than interpret the genes that code for them. Natural selection and evolution may ultimately depend on transmission via genes (and perhaps memes) but they are mediated by the structures and functions the genes manifest and the way in which the organism uses them (or not).

Tellingly, Dawkins uses the metaphor of the palimpsest here as his major device, rather than a simplistic ‘recipe’ or ‘code’. This concept of multiple layers of text written over the top of one another – each still more or less readable – provides a more nuanced view of the messiness of genetic information, and the difficulties we have reading it. Genes might be the most foundational language, but the various translations into flesh and bone and behaviour are vastly easier for us to read – like the ‘paintings’ and ‘statues’ Dawkins uses as metaphors to appeal to our predominantly visual senses in his opening chapters. Perhaps the palimpsest represents not merely the layers of change in our genes but the combination of the diverse disciplinary ways in which we can read evolutionary change. The more disciplinary insights we can bring to bear on the same question, the more likely we are to reveal evolutionary patterns that might not otherwise be noticed. This integrative interdisciplinary space is somewhere that popular scientific writers often excel, perhaps more so than many academic writers constrained by their increasingly siloed disciplines.

The Genetic Book of the Dead is far livelier than its title suggests. It does begin by paying tender homage to the dead – to Mike Cullen and Bill Hamilton – colleagues to whom Dawkins is deeply indebted for the rich intellectual environment that has shaped his own personal development. In more ways than one, this book addresses how the riches of the past can shape our understanding of the present. It is also a book full of colourful and charming anecdotes of animal mimicry, convergent evolution, ancestral and recurring traits, of bizarre and intriguing creatures, and the complexities of gene transmission: the ‘torturous trajectory’ of the turtle/tortoises back and forth between water and land, for example, or the slipping of genetic material horizontally between species. The evolutionary history of different species is complemented by a suite of well-constructed colour illustrations, photos, and diagrams that accompany the text. Dawkins deploys his trademark literary and science writing skills to maximum effect, harnessing the full suite of literary devices to explain and clarify even the most complicated concepts with a deft touch. ‘The snows of yesteryear’, for example, ‘are frozen into the winter plumage of the willow ptarmigan’. Scientific writing is a highly diverse genre ranging from the poetic to the most pragmatic prose; Dawkins’s distinctive style grows ever richer and more elegant with age.

Dawkins’ central focus, that species are not specifically adapted to the current environment in which they now live, but to an environment in the past to which their ancestors have adapted, is intriguing, as is the notion that animals, in effect, survive by predicting the future. Evolutionary survival is indeed a lucky dip, highlighting the perils of disrupting the narrow climate niche to which our species is specifically adapted.

Like all of Dawkins’ books, this is a book for his readers, new and old, with an interest in biology, the way the natural world has come to be, and where it might be going. But it is also a book for those scientists of the future – not just for their work as scientists, but also as writers and communicators. This book of the dead will continue speaking to the future for a long time to come.