Clinton Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the …
The renowned biologist Richard Dawkins constructs an entirely new perspective on living creatures: reading them as documents that describe ancient worlds.
On the back of a camouflaged lizard, a landscape of sand and stones appears to be artfully painted. Its skin can be interpreted as a description of an ancient desert—the world in which its ancestors survived. This approach, however, does not stop at the skin; it penetrates into the very fabric of the animal.
In this groundbreaking exploration of the power of Darwinian evolution and what it can reveal to us about the past, Richard Dawkins shows how the body, behavior, and genes of every living creature can be read like a book: an archive of the worlds in which its ancestors lived. In the future, a zoologist confronted with a previously unknown species will be able to decode the history of its ancestors and decipher its unique "Book of the Dead." Even today, such readings reveal the astonishing ways in which animals overcome obstacles, adapt to their environments, and arrive at strikingly similar solutions to life’s challenges—time and time again.
The author of The Selfish Gene offers a revolutionary, richly illustrated book that opens a door to the past: more vivid, profound, and captivating than anything we have seen before.
Jana Lenzová, born and raised in Bratislava, Slovakia, is an illustrator and translator. After translating Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion into Slovak, she began collaborating on his books as an illustrator.
Praise for the Book:
"A brilliant, clever, and splendidly written book!"
— Adrian Woolfson, The Wall Street Journal
"A true celebration… Perhaps the most joyful hymn Dawkins has ever dedicated to the wonders wrought by evolution in the animal world."
— Philip Ball, Science
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