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Nonfiction popular science books tend to utilize stock narrative forms. Works about cosmology or neuroscience, for instance, frequently employ the detective story of uncovering scientific truths via the discovery of clues, or the "Galileo myth" of the scientific hero standing up to dogmatic convention. A well-known example is Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which the author frames as narrating a "quest" that has been going on since "the dawn of civilization" (1988: 14). It even includes brief biographical sketches of some of the heroes-Newton, Einstein, and Galileo-to whom Hawking compares himself (122). In the popular science subgenre of works on evolutionary biology, these conventional narratives are likewise common. But there are other features of texts about evolution that are of special importance to the study of narrative. First, there is a pervasive textual metaphor not only at the heart of explanatory strategies in popular works but also integral to the more official technical language of textbooks and professionals. This metaphor figures the genome as a text to be read and copied, and nowadays to be edited through gene manipulation technologies. Meanwhile, the genome is also presented as the author of organisms'-including humans'-behavior. This prompts a metafictional reading, whereby the reader is thrown into an unusual relation to the "fictive" text of the genome, a text by which the reader is in some sense authored-her genes greatly influence who she is-but which she may in the future "rewrite" with elective gene therapies. I argue that this is a unique type of metalepsis with no equivalent in fictional narratives.
The personifi cation of genes is, as we will see, a more contested metaphorical device. Like the textual metaphor, it is also standardly employed in popular accounts of evolution, but it is not as pervasive in the technical literature. It is especially prominent in books that take the gene's-eye perspective, the nonpareil example of which is Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. The first edition, published in 1976 (recently released in a fortieth-anniversary edition), launched his career as probably the best-known contemporary popularizer of evolutionary theory. The central conceit of the book is that one should adopt the point of view of the gene, rather than that of the organism or species, in thinking about how evolution...