Niles Eldredge, palaeontologist

Your next book? Why We Do It: Rethinking sex and the selfish gene is out this month (W. W. Norton). From Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (John Murray, 1859) onwards, Eldredge says, “it is blindingly obvious that a major portion of the progress made in understanding evolution has come through books, rather than through the more conventional scientific papers in journal literature. This is more true of evolutionary theory, I think, than any other branch of science.” Current read? He is enjoying Randal Keynes’s Annie’s Box (Fourth Estate, 2001). “Keynes has pulled off the near-impossible,” he…