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Richard Dawkins delights in his own invective

17 July 2021

9:00 AM

17 July 2021

9:00 AM

Books Do Furnish a Life: Reading and Writing Science Richard Dawkins

Bantam Press, pp.464, 25

The late Derek Ratcliffe, arguably Britain’s greatest naturalist since Charles Darwin, once explained how he cultivated a technique for finding golden plovers’ nests. As he walked across the featureless moor, ‘the gaze’, he wrote, had to be ‘concentrated as far ahead as possible, not in one place, but scanning continuously over a wide arc from one side to the other and back’.

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