The spider-tailed horned viper makes use of its unique trap to trick birds into coming near
Matthijs Kuijpers/Alamy
The Genetic Guide of the Lifeless
Richard Dawkins (Yale College Press (US, out now); Apollo (UK, 17 October))
The overdue, nice evolutionary biologist William Hamilton it seems that used to correspond on second-hand postcards, writing over the unique script in different-coloured ink, once in a while at proper angles. In The Genetic Guide of the Lifeless: A Darwinian reverie, his colleague Richard Dawkins describes this as one of those palimpsest – “a manuscript by which later writing has been superimposed on previous (effaced) writing”. This, he says, is a…
