Richard Dawkins once complained that Nobel committees had rarely awarded its literature prize to nonfiction writers and never to a scientist. Science is “the poetry of reality”, he wrote, in defence of fact.
At the age of 85, the evolutionary biologist has had another thought and begun writing his first novel, a Jurassic Park-style tale that involves bringing two of our ancestors back from extinction.
Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, outlined the plot: a scientist “conceives the idea of bringing back to life Homo erectus”, he said in an interview with the Times. The scientist, named Rosalind – possibly a nod to Rosalind Franklin, whose work was the foundation for understanding the structure of DNA – becomes surrogate to two H erectus babies.
They are genetically unrelated and fall in love; Dawkins has imagined their linguistic abilities as more limited than those of Homo sapiens and they lack the ability to use adjectives or recursive grammar (essentially subclauses).
In science fiction anything is possible, but experts in human origins pointed out that the concept has several flaws. H erectus appeared about 2million years ago and died out more than 100,000 years ago, an evolutionary link between earlier hominid species such as Australopithecus afarensis – the best-known fossil is Lucy – and the Neanderthals and Denisovans who are our more immediate ancestral relatives.
“The whole idea that language magically appeared with Homo sapiens has been debunked,” said Mark Maslin, a professor at University College London and author of The Cradle of Humanity. “There’s no reason why Homo erectus couldn’t have had language and complex reasoning.”
The species was a “major leap forward”, with a big increase in brain size compared with previous hominid species, whose ancestry we share with chimpanzees and gorillas. Unlike them, humans have a post-puberty growth spurt, something which started with H erectus. They also used a complex set of tools and were the first of the hominids to leave Africa.
Biologically, humans might find it hard to be surrogate to H erectus, since the species might be too far apart for an implanted embryo to be accepted by a woman’s immune system. When Colossal Biosciences announced last year it had created three dire wolf pups through gene editing grey wolf embryos, sceptics said the changes were not close enough to the original dire wolf species. now extinct, to count.
Scientists such as George Church, a Harvard geneticist, have explored the idea of Neanderthal implantation. That would conceptually be easier since we know we share substantial amounts of DNA with the species, which died out only 40,000 years ago.
Maslin is sceptical about the premise of de-extincting H erectus. “I understand the attraction of bringing back dinosaurs,” he said. “But bringing back Homo erectus would be an incredibly selfish scientific experiment.” The fictional H erectus twins would have “no ecological niche”.
Newsletters
Choose the newsletters you want to receive
View more
For information about how The Observer protects your data, read our Privacy Policy
“It’s basically a curiosity for humans to experiment on,” Maslin said. “I don’t think ethically and morally the scientific community would ever go down that route, and if we had the technology, there are much more exciting things we could do, like reversing the biodiversity damage we’ve already done.”
Thank you for reading. Tell us what you think by writing to letters@observer.co.uk
Photograph by Adam Ihse / TT / Kod 9200