A More Language Oriented Response

Reading a biology book in English class is not a very common thing to do. I would even go to the extent of calling it an eccentric action. To be honest, when the book started out I felt a monotonous tone, a very scientific way of explaining things. However, as I read more and more each page shows me that there is not only one reason why we are reading this book but many that are hidden throughout its many pages. My responses were usually very prone of going on tangents about topics that were not related to English or to biology, so I decided that this entry would be more about the lingual part of the book. As I admitted a little back, the book has many interesting aspects that I had not imagined could be found in a book that explained a genetic theory. The monotonous tone that I had felt at the start of the text was lost as I read, and a very good example of this is the following passage of the book: “In particular, it is certainly wrong to condemn poor old Homo sapiens as the only species to kill his own kind, the only inheritor of the mark of Cain, and similar melodramatic charges.” (Dawkins, pg. 67) Dawkins’ tone is very clearly loaded with irony when he states that “men are old and pitiable” and also full of irritation at the “melodramatic” tendencies of most people. Risking surrender to the trait of stereotypical thinking, Dawkins being a scientist is probably a very methodical person who does not hold drama and “myths” in high regard, and I think that is more than obvious looking at his word choice and the way his idea is put on paper. As a scientist writing a book about how different individuals and species survive in their environment he knows that man is the best doted species, and that we are, at least in the biological core, far from “poor” and “old”.

The word choice in the book is also a remarkable aspect, and one in which I would like to comment. It is amazing to see how in a book that pivots around a very specific topic as genes words are not used in an overly large amount where it is infuriating to see the word written down. This has happened to me in other texts, the most fresh example being in Sabato’s Sobre héroes y tumbas where the world “paulatinamente” was used with such a frequency I would picture it in almost every paragraph. In the present text, instead, Dawkins tries to use synonyms and metaphors to get around using the same images all the time, and as a reader I am eternally grateful for this.