“Now they go by the names of genes, and we are their survival machines.”
The most famous sentence in a book is usually its first: best of times, Ishmael, happy families, truth universally acknowledged, etc. The best sentences in books, however, often tuck themselves away — like birds with a propensity for edge habitats — at the ends of chapters.
The fame of firstlings isn’t hard to explain. They are, first of all, easy to find. No riffling, no scanning (I could have sworn it was on the left), no fussing with weirdly paginated editions. And writers lavish an inordinate (often crippling) amount of attention on openings. First sentences stand before us with their hair combed, their ties tightly knotted, their expressions crazed with hypoxia and eagerness to please. It would feel almost churlish not to applaud.
Chapter-ending sentences, on the other hand, are the self-assured naturals of the linguistic family — they sit quietly all through the dinner party before delivering the perfect aperçus. They develop spontaneously, almost accidentally, out of the pages and paragraphs leading up to them. A string of dialog, landing on a line both pregnant and naturalistic. A decisive bit of action (boarding a plane, leaving a house) that reverberates nicely across the half-page of white.
In the closing pages of a chapter you can sometimes feel an author recognizing in real time the possibilities (rhythmic, tonal, narrative) toward which the last hundred half-conscious decisions have been steering her. Wait, if I say it like that, and put that bit of description here, I can end with a… The feeling is like watching an alley-oop develop. It only looks inevitable on the highlight reel.
The best literary alley-oop I’ve ever seen takes place at the end of the second chapter of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. I remember where I was when I read it — and how I sat staring afterward, like an M. Night Shyamalan character at the moment of revelation. Let’s watch him set it up.
But first: The Selfish Gene is a hugely influential pop science book from 1976 — good and important enough to drown out much of the repetitive and adolescent blathering that Dawkins has been up to in the decades since. The book argues that genes, rather than organisms or groups, are the crucial evolutionary players — the selectees on whom natural selection acts. This sounds fairly dry — the sort of thing that flees your mind the moment you hand in your AP Bio exam — but Dawkins manages, via genuine ardor and blessedly jargon-free prose, to make it thrilling. If you merely “know” the theory of evolution (if you’d have to pause and chew your lip before explaining it to a curious eight-year-old), then this is the book that will truly make the subject yours. Dawkins writes like the best teacher in school trying desperately to make things clear for his back-row student. He wants you to get it not because there’s a test but because it’s beautiful.
Now back to the highlights: in chapter two Dawkins is explaining — speculating, he admits — about how it is that living things came to be in the first place. Millions of years ago (orange skies, flickering lightning) the oceans were brimming with all sorts of muck. And then (to paraphrase Vonnegut) some muck sat up. How did that happen?
Dawkins begins, as great teachers do, with disarming simplicity. The Universe, he says, is populated by stable things. “It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts long enough to be worth naming. Or it may be a class of entities, such as rain drops, that come into existence at a sufficiently high rate to deserve a collective name, even if any one of them is short-lived.” This is, to my tastes, ideal science writing. Conversational, methodical, with a faintly irritable crispness. He is going to take your hand — perhaps holding it ever-so-slightly-too-hard — and guide you through the intellectual jungle.
Dawkins explains that these stable things (by which he mainly means the chemical elements floating around in the primordial muck) eventually formed new configurations. This element bangs into that one and together they form a rudimentary sort of molecule. These configurations were no more willful — no more designed — than the configurations formed by the headphone-wires in your tote bag. But eventually, given literal aeons in which to twist and tangle, a special type of configuration arose: one that could make copies of itself. “This may seem a very unlikely sort of accident to happen. So it was… But in our human estimates of what is probable and what is not, we are not used to dealing in hundreds of millions of years.”
So: now we’ve got molecules that can make copies of themselves (Dawkins calls them replicators) and the play has really begun to develop. These replicators, given still further aeons, blunder into survival strategies — they develop protective coats; they get better at the business of copying themselves.
And this is the point in the highlight at which the court is so full of complicated doings — the clock counting down, players calling for the ball — that we forget entirely what is about to happen. It’s all I can do as a reader to keep straight the primordial soup, the replicators, the survival strategies. I have zero neurons to spare.
Which is precisely how Dawkins — the canny point guard ticking his eyes significantly toward the basket — wants it. “What weird engines of self-preservation would the millennia bring forth?” he writes, straight-facedly. “Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots…”
Here is where my stomach, with a slight nervous tingle, begins to register something that my conscious mind hasn’t yet: someone’s about to dunk, aren’t they?
“They have come a long way, those replicators.”
Wait a minute, I’m the one who’s going to dunk! He’s looking at me! And so off I race, out of the stands, across the court, leaping toward the basket just in time to intercept the chapter’s final sentence:
“Now they go by the names of genes, and we are their survival machines.”
We. How diabolically clever. How brain-dissolvingly simple.
The crowd goes wild. Dawkins, roaring in celebration, lifts me off the ground. The stadium’s din becomes so loud that for an instant, strangely, it registers as silence. I feel unmistakably alive.
Wow repeat wow. Thank you, Ben!
Speaking of excellent sentences that tuck themselves away into the ends of paragraphs... "He wants you to get it not because there’s a test but because it’s beautiful."
What a wonderfully succinct way of explaining the joy of this book and why it's a worthwhile read even to those enough who may already understand evolution well enough to pass an 8th grade biology exam!