While, once upon a time, I enjoyed The Selfish Gene I have grown increasingly less fond of Richard Dawkins' programme the more I have read around it, and the more he has developed his personality cult. The arch-baiter of dogmatists these days has sufficient hubris - and a corresponding lack of self-awareness - to label his own website, which resembles nothing quite so much as Jerry Falwell's, a "clear thinking oasis".

And no, I'm not a Christian. Despite a one-time flirtation with Daniel Dennett's Dangerous Idea, these days dispositionally, I line up with the enlightened pluralism of Richard Dawkins' scientific nemesis the late Stephen Jay Gould. I think there is value in the philosophy of science, and to make matters worse, Thomas Kuhn (according to Dawkins, merely a fashionable version of that ghastly "postmodernist" Karl Popper) is one of my favourite philosophers.

I stake out my credentials unapologetically so the Dawkins faithful can with clear conscience write off my largely positive views of this book as heretical screed, just as they will the book itself. There are some things, you see which just shouldn't be said.

Fern Elsdon-Baker says quite a lot of them in this nicely put together volume. And this time the charges have a chance of sticking: Much of the (abundant) public criticism of Richard Dawkins' recent output has been tarred somehow by a brush of religious inclination - even Richard Holloway's striking, insightful and substantively secular views can be discounted as emanations from a man of God, erstwhile though that relationship may be.

Elsdon-Baker's a biologist without an evangelical bone in her body: notionally one of Dawkins' (or at any rate Gould's) congregation. And I have a strong feeling that she doesn't like Richard Dawkins much. But, like the dog in the night-time, you can only deduce that from the studied absence of any evidence for it. Elsdon-Baker treats her subject with a striking equanimity - especially startling since Dawkins himself often fails to display that courtesy to those holding opinions which transgress the Clear Thinking Oasis' prayerbook. Elsdon-Baker's politeness; her painstaking even-handedness can only have been born out of a peculiarly British contempt.

For, once she gets going, Elsdon-Baker drives a coach and horses through much of Richard Dawkins' oeuvre, and is especially devastating about his extra-curricular forays into philosophy and religion. She often scores in playfully self-referential ways, describing the "evolution" of the idea of evolution in a way which belies Dawkins' "whiggish" notion that natural selection sprang perfectly formed from Darwin's brow one blustery afternoon on Galapagos.

If I had a criticism of this book it would be that much of the early chapters are bogged down in that exposition of the origin of the natural selection idea, and in particular what Darwin himself thought about group selection and Lamarckian transmission. I suppose Eldon-Baker would justify this since her first charge is that Dawkins has expropriated Darwin's name and applied it to his own, radical, reconstruction. So much whiggishness, I suppose, but other than settling an academic score this won't quicken the reader's pulse.

What matters more is whether Dawkins' neo-Darwinian account stands up on its own. Whether it does or not is a narrower question, and one of even more limited interest to non-specialists. But it seems dogmatic - the pluralist version advanced by Gould (that the evolutionary algorithm (being, in Dennett's terminology, substrate-neutral, after all) can operate on any constructions which replicate with variation, and so may operate at different levels of abstraction (gene, cell, organism, species, idea, theory - why artificially limit?) provides less overall certainty and predictability but correspondingly more plausibility as an explanation.

Elsdon-Baker mentions Popper's casual (and subsequently retracted) remark that evolution might not be falsifiable at all - being compatible with any observations. This is an interesting point and I think worth of more study, particularly when rendered more like a mathematical property than a scientific one: after all, when any phenomenon replicates with variations, isn't it necessarily the case that those variations best suited to the environment will be most prosperous? Conversely those variations which did not prosper would, *by definition*, be less "fit". And evidence for that is the extraordinary surfeit of otherwise plainly contradictory sociological and scientific theories which claim Darwinian antecedence - possible only because, if you are imaginative enough, you can make the Darwinian argument support just about any proposition you fancy.

As she moves from the technical quibbles within biology towards Dawkins' emotive style of discourse (questionable, from the Professor of Public Understanding of Science) and ill-advised forays into philosophy and religion, Elsdon-Baker picks up the pace, but while entertaining this part of the book is less essential (the criticisms being obvious on their face for the most part). Nonetheless, an entertaining and skilfully put together work.

Not, I imagine, that this will faze the congregation of Dawkins' clear thinking oasis for a moment. But no reason not to hope for it, all the same.

Let us pray. ( )