This is not the Richard Dawkins you know — not the ferociously brilliant evolutionary biologist, author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. Nor the gleefully pugnacious atheist Dawkins, author of The God Delusion.
A clue as to what makes this book different was let slip by Dawkins himself. He has described it on Twitter as “perfect for 16+” — and it is written with elegant simplicity. (It is richly illustrated, expensively weighty and just, well, smells good. It is extraordinary that a publisher can create a book this beautiful for the price of a few greetings cards.)
The book is an introduction to the biology of flight and, because it explains everything, to evolutionary theory. Dawkins describes how the wings of bats, birds and pterodactyls look superficially similar, for instance, because they do much the same job. Beneath the skin though, a bat spreads its wing using four long fingers while a pterodactyl employs a single, superlong one. (Pterodactyl means “wing finger” in Greek.) A bird’s wing, meanwhile, hangs off its whole arm taking advantage of its feathers, which probably first evolved as a form of insulation.
Tackling creationists who demand “what is the use of half a wing”, he explains the incremental evolutionary advantages of being able to jump or glide that bit further in the forest. He describes flying squirrels, with their parachute-like patagium, and flying fish. Both species glide — up to 200m in the case of the fish, which don’t flap their fins in the air but roll from side to side to create lift. Dawkins confesses to being “a little surprised” that fish have not yet evolved true flight.
Read only as a bestiary, the book is a joy. Dawkins introduces the largest bird ever to fly: Argentavis magnificens, which weighed 80kg and needed a wing area as large as a skydiving parachute. It is long extinct. At the other end of the scale, and still extant, there is the fairyfly — scientific name Tinkerbella nana, unbelievably — which can drift through the eye of a needle, using its frilly wings like a pair of oars. Ordinary flies, meanwhile, are unusual in having only one pair of wings. The other evolved into a pair of sticklike appendages that act as a gyroscope, stabilising flight. These “halteres” are minuscule, but a fly cannot fly without them.
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Dawkins delights in such curiosities. He introduces us to dolphin dandruff — they shed the outer layer of their skin every two hours, which helps prevent the formation of tiny, slowing vortices while swimming. To the tuning-fork-like scales on some moth’s wings, which resonate at frequencies that cancel out a bat’s ultrasound detection squeaks, helping the moths stay off-radar like stealth bombers. And to Airbus, which is apparently considering flying jets in V-formation flocks to save fuel — on the basis that it works for geese and cyclists.
There are flashes of the old Dawkins temper. He makes a half-hearted swing at the idea of angels, claiming that 77 per cent of Americans think they are real while Muslims are supposedly “required to believe in them”. He scoffs scientifically at the Icarus myth, pointing out that as the boy soared higher the air would have got colder, not hotter.
He even has a gentle pop at Leonardo. Describing how the angel’s wings in his Annunciation “would struggle to lift a child”, he speculates that the anatomist in the artist must have been “embarrassed by the absurdity” of the lack of giant supporting muscles and an equally giant anchoring breastbone. He thinks this may explain why Gabriel’s wings are “awkwardly drawn”.
Although the style is plain, Dawkins’s prose feels as if it were cut with a laser. Explaining how insect wings were probably first used as a kind of sunbathing panel and then adapted for flight, he writes that “evolution is condemned to modify previous designs step by tiny step”. Commenting on how bees spread pollen picked up while gorging on energy-rich nectar, he observes: “Flowers pay dearly for their hired wings.”
These are well-weighed words, smuggling in the fruits of a lifetime’s thinking about evolution. Dawkins has always been an extraordinarily muscular, persuasive thinker. What feels new here is that he writes with such charm and warmth. Genial Uncle Richard, for me, is the most likeable Dawkins yet.
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Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design & Evolution by Richard Dawkins, illustrated by Jana Lenzová
Head of Zeus £20 pp294
