Rachel Bilson was busy, so Playboy interviewed Richard Dawkins this month. From a give-and-take about what genetic mapping might mean to us:

“PLAYBOY: You’ve said you expect mankind will have a genetic book of the dead by 2050. How would that be helpful?

DAWKINS: Because we contain within us the genes that have survived through generations, you could theoretically read off a creature’s evolutionary history. ‘Ah, yes, this animal lived in the sea. This is the time when it lived in deserts. This bit shows it must have lived up mountains. And this shows it used to burrow.’

PLAYBOY: Could that help us bring back a dinosaur? You have suggested crossing a bird and a crocodile and maybe putting it in an ostrich egg.

DAWKINS: It would have to be more sophisticated than a cross. It’d have to be a merging.

PLAYBOY: Could we re-create Lucy?

DAWKINS: We already know the human genome and the chimpanzee genome, so you could make a sophisticated guess as to what the genome of the common ancestor might have been like. From that you might be able to grow an animal that was close to the common ancestor. And from that you might split the difference between that ancestral animal you re-created and a modern human and get Lucy.” (Thanks Browser.)