The Expectant Valley, by Desmond Morris, which featured on the cover of the first edition of The Selfish Gene and which is pictured here hanging in Richard Dawkins’s Oxford home in 2022 Photo: Emma Park (cropped from her original). Ernest Rutherford is supposed to have said that ‘all science is either physics or stamp collecting’. This reflects an enduring perception that, with their test tubes, lab coats, and dense equations, the physical sciences are hard.