Someone clever at the publisher Penguin had a nifty idea: reissue three titles by Richard Dawkins, each decorated uniquely with an adorable Dawkins biomorph. From New Scientist:

First let loose upon the public at the inaugural Artificial Life conference at Los Alamos in New Mexico in 1987, these revolutionary computer-based critters, which variously took the form of waves, shells and insects, were some of the first, and certainly the most influential digital demonstrations of evolution in action…

The program shows how it is possible to develop the features of simple life forms merely by choosing parents with desirable characteristics. Piling success on success, fully formed features develop after remarkably few generations.

Penguin is releasing three key three titles by Richard Dawkins — The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable and Unweaving the Rainbow — and every copy will carry a unique book jacket together with a code enabling the reader to visit their biomorph on www.mountimprobable.com. [Emphasis added.]

You can visit your biomorph, kind of like a pet rock, but online. Cute! The only problem is those biomorphs are no “digital demonstrations of evolution in action,” nor do they “show how it is possible to develop the features of simple life forms.”

Don’t believe me? Here’s what Nature had to say about biomorphs, and Dawkins’s scientific legacy more generally, in a review of part two of his memoir, Brief Candle in the Dark, published last year:

Much of Dawkins’s research has been in silico, writing programs for evolutionary simulations. In his simulations, life is utterly determined by genes, which specify developmental rules and fixed traits such as colour. The more lifelike his digital animals (“biomorphs”) become, the more persuaded he is that real genes work in roughly the same way. Dawkins’s critics accuse him of genetic determinism. This synopsis of his work shows that his life virtually depends on it.

A curious stasis underlies Dawkins’s thought. His biomorphs are grounded in 1970s assumptions. Back then, with rare exceptions, each gene specified a protein and each protein was specified by a gene. The genome was a linear text — a parts list or computer program for making an organism –insulated from the environment, with the coding regions interspersed with “junk”.

Today’s genome is much more than a script: it is a dynamic, three-dimensional structure, highly responsive to its environment and almost fractally modular. Genes may be fragmentary, with far-flung chunks of DNA sequence mixed and matched in bewildering combinatorial arrays. A universe of regulatory and modulatory elements hides in the erstwhile junk. Genes cooperate, evolving together as units to produce traits. Many researchers continue to find selfish DNA a productive idea, but taking the longer view, the selfish gene per se is looking increasingly like a twentieth-century construct.

Dawkins’s synopsis shows that he has not adapted to this view. He nods at cooperation among genes, but assimilates it as a kind of selfishness. The microbiome and the 3D genome go unnoticed. Epigenetics is an “interesting, if rather rare, phenomenon” enjoying its “fifteen minutes of pop science voguery”, which it has been doing since at least 2009, when Dawkins made the same claim in The Greatest Show on Earth (Transworld). Dawkins adheres to a deterministic language of “genes for” traits. As I and other historians have shown, such hereditarianism plays into the hands of the self-styled race realists.

The biomorphs are “grounded in 1970s assumptions,” long outdated, while the “selfish gene per se is looking increasingly like a twentieth-century construct.”

Judged for his prose, Dawkins remains one of the best science explainers around. As a celebrity atheist, he rarely fails to entertain. Considered strictly as science, though, his books, like his bimorphs, appeal to nostalgia more than anything else.

Photo: Dawkins uses hands to form what looks like (but probably isn’t) a biomorph, by Anders Hesselbom [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.