Dear Mr Darwin

Letters On The Evolution Of Life And Human Nature

"Dear Mr Darwin, You might find it presumptuous of me, if not a little macabre, that I should take up my pen and write to you more than a hundred years after your death. But I'm encouraged to do this because it is on record that you yourself wrote almost 14,000 letters on scientific issues, many of which I expect were answers to unsolicited correspondence . . . I cannot know whether or not, deep in your tomb in Westminster Abbey, you've been keeping abreast since your demise with the ups and downs of your theory of evolution which you called, quite cleverly (and a little misleadingly as it turned out), "natural selection" . . . Despite the gulf that separates us in time and means, I know that this letter will arouse your scientific interests, for it touches on some of the central issues with which you wrestled all your life . . ."

Thus begins an imagined two-way correspondence between the geneticist Gabriel Dover and Charles Darwin on the surprising findings of modern genetics and their influence on the evolution of biological novelties, from genes to organisms.
This book takes the father of evolution on an exhilarating roller-coaster ride through the new genetics, revealing a world far more intricate and subtle than can be expected from the notion of natural selection acting alone - a world in which genes are born to co-operate.