Tell us about your first choice.

This isn’t Charles Darwin’s great work. The Origin of Species is the one we’re all taught so I hadn’t read this one until recently. It’s a fun read about a young man on an expedition finding things out. It’s as much about the journey as it is about evolution, but you can hear the idea gestating, the beginnings of the most amazing idea ever. The Origin of Species is a bit heavy going, but this is about the process of science, about him using his brain, the creative imaginative bit of science where he’s wondering why these fossils are here on top of the Andes. He sees Valparaiso destroyed by an earthquake erupting and is horrified by the brutality of nature – it’s as much a travelogue as anything else, but you can see how his mind is beginning to work. I wish I’d read it when I was younger – I’d have gone off a similar journey if I had.

Can he write?

Yes. It’s full of anecdotes and humour. I mean, he’s aware that he is an academic, and there are long passages about shale beds and geological formations that a travel writer might have left out, but he describes the meals he ate and the people he meets. You really get a feeling of his enthusiasm. It rips along.

And the Richard Dawkins?

Well, this is a man who has become known for banging on about God, who has turned into a stuffy old academic agitator, a bit of a gob, and a vicar without the dog collar. So I wanted to remind everyone that in the 70s, when he wrote The Selfish Gene, he really did something amazing.  The Blind Watchmaker refutes some of the criticisms of that first important book and I think it’s also much more accessible and well articulated. It radicalised me. I’d done evolution for biology A-level and I knew it led to life on Earth as we know it, but somehow he, and perhaps he alone, had really understood what Darwin said, and he explains it in a way that is so elegantly powerful that I was an instant convert. He brought Darwin up to date, explaining evolution in a way that incorporates our understanding of genetics and heredity.

You say you were a convert, but aren’t we all already converted to evolutionary theory? What did Dawkins add?

Essentially, he argues that Darwin was looking at the organism, at the animal or plant and how it responded to the influence of nature, but that we now need to think about the gene. The gene is chemistry – it’s programmed to ensure its own survival. It doesn’t care about you – it’s the selfish gene. He takes evolution one step deeper. It is totally fundamental and shows how the world got there along the way. The power of Richard Dawkins is similar to that of a popularizer of science like Stephen Hawking. Hawking started people thinking about Einstein – it took a century for some people to really understand the enormity of the Einstein’s ideas that completely rule our lives. And most of us, myself included, are still getting to grips with them. I think Dawkins was the first person to really help the rest of us understand evolution. Natural selection, he explains, is at the genetic level. The gene is the unit of natural selection, not the organism.

This is a book that I think even some evolutionary biologists read and say; “What I studied was much more interesting than I thought!”