Jan 22 2010
Dawkins’ Book: The Poetry
I hope books never go the way of the Dodo. And by “books” I mean the paper-and-ink variety.
Okay, maybe I’m being like the sentimentalist from a century ago. “I’ve had such memorable, pleasant experiences with the horse-and-buggy mode of transportation that I sincerely hope it isn’t completely replaced by that foreign automobile thing.”
In terms of cultural evolution, is the book all that different from the horse-and-buggy? I don’t know if it is.
Admittedly, I’ve yet to hold a Kindle in my hands. It doesn’t have an internal combustion engine, but still. The experience of reading . . . a book . . . with it will be quite different, I imagine.
Speaking of pulp-flesh and ink-blood books, Dawkins’ recent rather hefty one, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, has a rather pleasant poetic vein running through it. Dawkins can craft a hell-of-a sentence. His prose is both erudite and supple. Consider these snippets from the book (gathered via a very quick flip-through):
“What delayed humanity’s tumbling to that luminously simple idea . . . ” (p. 21)
“For the mind encased in Platonic blinkers, a rabbit is a rabbit is a rabbit.” p. 23
“Presumably genes for floppy ears and piebald coats are pleotropically linked to genes for tameness, in foxes as well as in dogs.” p. 76
“The human body abounds with what, in one sense, we could call imperfections but, in another sense, should be seen as inescapable compromises resulting from our long ancestral history of descent from other kinds of animals.” p.365
I don’t know if Dawkins’ latest book is destined to will become a classic, but it does merit wide readership. The many pages of full-color illustrations are reason enough to consider adding the book to your library.
Library . . . is that another Dodo?
