It was a very Richard Dawkins moment. About 10 minutes into an interview, as he sat in the airy living room of his Oxford home, casually attired in a T-shirt with a dinosaur emblazoned on its front and in midtalk about The Ancestor’s Tale, his book about evolution that some regard as his magnum opus, Dawkins had suddenly interrupted the conversation, risen to his feet, and stalked off to look up a very British word he had just used.
“I just wouldn’t have felt comfortable saying, ‘I am a duckbilled platypus, and this is how I find my shrimps,’ ” he had said. “I think it would have been twee.”
Dawkins begins one chapter of the book with a witty and erudite introduction to the platypus, an animal renowned for the ducklike bill grafted onto its mammalian body. “It seemed so weird when first discovered,” Dawkins writes, “that a specimen ...
