Just as we trace our personal family trees from parents to grandparents and so on back in time, so in The Ancestor's Tale Richard Dawkins traces the ancestry of life. As he is at pains to point out, this is very much our human tale, our ancestry. Surprisingly, it is one that many otherwise literate people are largely unaware of. Hopefully Dawkins's name and well deserved reputation as a best selling writer will introduce them to this wonderful saga.The Ancestor's Tale takes us from our immediate human ancestors back through what he calls concestors, those shared with the apes, monkeys and other mammals and other vertebrates and beyond to the dim and distant microbial beginnings of life some 4 billion years ago. It is a remarkable story which is still very much in the process of being uncovered. And, of course from a scientist of Dawkins stature and reputation we get an insider's knowledge of the most up-to-date science and many of those involved in the research. And, as we have come to expect of Dawkins, it is told with a passionate commitment to scientific veracity and a nose for a good story. Dawkins's knowledge of the vast and wonderful sweep of life's diversity is admirable. Not only does it encompass the most interesting living representatives of so many groups of organisms but also the important and informative fossil ones, many of which have only been found in recent years.
Dawkins sees his journey with its reverse chronology as cast in the form of an epic pilgrimage from the present to the past [and] all roads lead to the origin of life. It is, to my mind, a sensible and perfectly acceptable approach although some might complain about going against the grain of evolution. The great benefit for the general reader is that it begins with the more familiar present and the animals nearest and dearest to usour immediate human ancestors. And then it delves back into the more remote and less familiar past with its droves of lesser known and extinct fossil forms. The whole pilgrimage is divided into 40 tales, each based around a group of organisms and discusses their role in the overall story. Genetic, morphological and fossil evidence is all taken into account and illustrated with a wealth of photos and drawings of living and fossils forms, evolutionary and distributional charts and maps through time, providing a visual compliment and complement to the text. The design also allows Dawkins to make numerous running comments and characteristic asides. There are also numerous references and a good index.-- Douglas Palmer
From Scientific American
In this expansive book, Dawkins, the well-known evolutionary biologist and author (The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, A Devil's Chaplain, among others), gives us an eloquent treatise on evolution, ne-glecting neither the latest developments nor his own provocative views. As the title suggests, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales provides the model for the book's conceit--a pilgrimage back through four billion years of life on earth. We join with other organisms at rendezvous points where we find common ancestors, until we arrive at the "grand ancestor of all surviving life." As Dawkins explains: "Backward chronology in search of ancestors really can sensibly aim towards a single distant target ... and we can't help converging upon it no matter where we start--elephant or eagle, swift or salmonella, wellingtonia or woman.... Instead of treating evolution as aimed toward us, we choose modern Homo sapiens as our arbitrary, but forgivably preferred, starting point for a reverse chronology.... Following Chaucer's lead, my pilgrims, which are all the different species of living creatures, will have the opportunity to tell tales along the way to their Canterbury, which is the origin of life. It is these tales that form the main substance of this book." Editors of Scientific American (202)
*Starred Review* Plato plays the intellectual villain in this latest work of popular science by one of our most visible biologists. Dawkins indicts the ancient Greek thinker for advancing a doctrine of Ideal Types that has long obscured the linkages making all species one connected continuum. To remedy the effects of Plato's sin, Dawkins sets out on a pilgrimage tracing the history of the human species back to the very origins of life, marking along the way 39 rendezvous points where the human genealogical path crosses that of other terrestrial species. From kindred chimpanzees to humanity's hidden ties with eubacteria--and beyond into the very beginnings of heredity-- Dawkins charts an impressive body of biological theory and research, sometimes speculatively but never obscurely. Nonspecialists will marvel at the electronic location techniques of the platypus and the jet-propulsion travel of the squid, astonishing evidence of how nature has anticipated modern human ingenuity. As in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (1976), the biology comes laced with antireligious polemic, even the unifying metaphor of a pilgrimage intended to discredit the faith of traditional pilgrims. But then Dawkins does not reserve his iconoclasm for scriptural doctrines: challenging the scientific orthodoxy of evolutionary improbability, he asserts that if the planet's chronological tape were rewound and played again, the dynamics of biochemistry would once again yield microbes, mammals, and man. Lively and daring, a book certain to draw even casual readers deep into the adventure--and controversy--of science. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"One of Dawkins's best: a big, almost encyclopedic compendium bursting with information and ideas." -- Kirkus Reviews, Starred
"This is an ambitious, important book rich with fascinating insights. Also, it couldn't come at a better time." --Carl Zimmer -- The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Richard Dawkins taught zoology at the University of California at Berkeley and at Oxford University and is now the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position he has held since 1995. Among his previous books are The Ancestors Tale, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and A Devils Chaplain. Dawkins lives in Oxford with his wife, the actress and artist Lalla Ward.
Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.
From The Washington Post
It's easy to imagine that the entire history of the universe is a kind of buildup to the appearance of Homo sapiens -- that the whole thing, somehow, is about us. Most writers on the subject of evolution (and I include a heartfelt mea culpa here) simply make a ritual genuflection to point out that the life history of humans is of no more fundamental importance than that of butterflies or Furbish's lousewort and then go on to talk only about humans. After all, it's humans who will be reading our books. Richard Dawkins of Oxford University is a well known figure in evolutionary theory. His book The Selfish Gene set the tone for a decade of debate about the inclusion of the new science of genetics into our view of the past history of life -- an inclusion that is now a routine part of the field. In this book, he undertakes a sweeping overview of that history, but an overview emphasizing that the life story of every species is equally interesting.
Modeling his book self-consciously after Canterbury Tales, he imagines all species on Earth simultaneously beginning a journey backward in time, each following its own lifeline in a kind of pilgrimage to origins. As each species travels backward, it encounters others at points that Dawkins calls "rendezvous." At a rendezvous, we find the last common ancestor of the two species that are meeting. For example, by Dawkins's reckoning, human beings make their first real rendezvous between 5 and 7 million years in the past, with a primate whose lines of descent include us and the chimpanzees. At each rendezvous, there is a discussion of the fellow pilgrims we meet, then a "Tale," à la Chaucer. Thus, for example, as we trace human ancestry back, we have the Chimpanzee's Tale, the Beaver's Tale, as well as the Cauliflower's Tale (my personal favorite) and so on, right back to what he calls Taq's Tale, the story of an obscure bacterium (Thermus acquaticus) and a discussion of the origin of life itself. Each "Tale" goes into as much detail as is necessary to elucidate the scientific point illustrated by the rendezvous. The Cauliflower's Tale, for example, deals with the relation between rate of metabolism and body size, which seems to follow a regular trend for organisms from bacteria to whales.
This is great stuff -- intriguingly written, honest about the controversies that exist, clear about the science. Dawkins does not dodge complexity where it is called for but keeps it to a minimum and winds up giving us as full and clear a picture of the way life developed on our planet as you are likely to find anywhere.
In the end, I had only two general problems with this book, one technical, one stylistic. Dawkins is clearly what I have come to think of as a "gene guy" -- someone who wants to look at life from the perspective of DNA. Because of this, my sense is that he underplays the importance of fossils in his discussions. He claims, for example, that we could reconstruct the history of life just from living DNA, without any fossils at all. I am very skeptical of this claim, although this is a subject on which reasonable people can (and do) differ. It is never explicitly stated, but the book has a tone of genetic determinism, the notion that if you know an organism's DNA, you know everything important about that organism. There is virtually no mention of the importance of what are called epigenetic effects -- effects outside DNA that influence how an organism functions. I fear that coming to an understanding of how living things work isn't going to be as simple as sequencing a genome.
The stylistic problem involves Dawkins's disconcerting habit of occasionally dropping in snide asides designed to demonstrate, I suppose, his impeccable politically correct sentiments. For example, in talking about the development of agriculture in the Middle East 10,000 years ago, he takes a swipe at the American Army for not preventing the looting of the Baghdad museum. (He conveniently ignores the fact that most of what was missing wasn't looted but removed for safekeeping, and what looting took place was almost certainly done by museum employees, possibly before the war even started.) At first these little asides were merely irritating, but after a while they got really annoying -- kind of like being trapped at a cocktail party by the most pompous, supercilious member of the English department.
Dawkins is certainly entitled to hold and express his views, but they seem jarringly out of place in this book. He is far too good a writer, and too important a figure in the battle against scientific illiteracy, to allow these kinds of sophomoric self-indulgences to detract from a splendid piece of writing.
Reviewed by James Trefil
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
