River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1996) 14/12/05. Reviewed by Jon Turney Richard Dawkins presents the history of life as a glorious flow of information.

Richard Dawkins's most famous book is still 'The Selfish Gene', but some find it quite demanding reading. His later popular books are mostly easier to follow, and in some ways better-crafted pieces of writing. Like 'The Selfish Gene' they are notable for their uncompromising commitment to a gene-centred view of Darwinism, and a command of metaphor that gives each one its own guiding thread. In 'Climbing Mount Improbable', for example, he weaves a host of different biological phenomena together using the idea of peaks in fitness landscapes, those abstract spaces devised by theoreticians some decades previously. In 'River Out of Eden', published around the same time, the metaphor is one of his own devising.

The river of the title is a river of DNA, and flows through time. It stands for the continuity of genes through the history of life. Successful ones replicate, and continue their metaphorical journey into the next generation. A river of information links the life we see around us with the earliest organisms. Every tributary (this river branches rather than converging like the watery ones we normally think of) is linked with the earliest DNA-based organisms. Every contemporary organism can in principle trace its ancestry back through an unbroken chain to the origins of life on earth.

It is an arresting vision, as is his alternative formulation of individual genes as "a band of good companions marching through geological time". And he makes the most of them to offer a compelling view of the history of life. Much of it, of course, is taken up with the ways in which genes get to keep in the flow. Their information is more likely to be preserved if they confer some reproductive advantage on the individual organisms in which they (temporarily) reside. And Dawkins works through some of his favourite examples of how this gives rise to evolutionary change – the development of the eye, orchids which mimic female wasps to encourage cross-pollination by males, bees dancing to impart information to their fellow workers.

Along the way he is characteristically waspish himself, at the expense of Darwinian doubters of various stripes, notably Creationists and cultural relativists. But there is less of this than in some of his other books, and you can forgive him his Darwinian zeal for the skill with which he conveys the essence of the theory. There are also chapters on the evidence from mitochondrial DNA for an African 'Eve', and a final chapter that gives a dizzying overview of the history of life on earth, which deploys yet another knockout metaphor, the 'replication bomb'.

The book, which appeared in the Science Masters series of primers, is intended as an introduction, but this does not compromise the care with which each portion of the evolutionary story is presented. Nevertheless, you guess that this one was fun to write. It is certainly fun to read.

Book details

Paperback 224 pages (May 1996)
Publisher: Phoenix
Language: English
ISBN: 1857994051