Bibliofreakblog

The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life by Richard Dawkins

OMG!  You have to read this book!  That statement might make anyone holding a chair at Oxford University shudder, but it’s true.  There are some books out there that everyone should read, and my God, this is one of them. 

I’m not saying that everyone has to believe in evolution (O.K., I am a little bit) but remember that this day in age, even the Catholic Church is on board with the “theory”.  Whatever you personally believe, remember that it is also important to know what other people (like scientists and doctors) have come to see has true. 

Furthermore, Richard Dawkins is one of the prolific thinkers of our time.  Probably of any time.  I read once that there was a poll (sometime in the ’90’s?) by a British magazine where Richard Dawkins was named the world’s third top intellectual, beat out only be Noam Chomsky (ew!) and Umberto Eco (yay!). 

For the rest that follows, I am going to assume that everything Dawkins writes in The Ancestor’s Tale is true.

In The Ancestor’s Tale, Dawkins takes us back through time tracing our ancestry back to the first replicating creature some 4 billion years ago.  He begins with our immediate ancestors of the genera Homo and Australopithecus.  Then we “rendezvous” with chimpanzees, then gorillas, and eventually all primates.  There are 40 “rendezvous” points in all, each telling their own tales.  Ourselves and what we conventionally view as our ancestors are considered “rendezvous 0″. 

By the time we get to the ancestor shared by all primates, we are already 63 million years in the past at “rendezvous 8″.  (That’s right, do the math: one fifth of our adventure is over and we’ve just covered the primates).  By the time we meet up with the duckbill platypus to find the last ancestor we share with all mammals, we’ve gone back 180 million years and are at “rendezvous 15″.  You can see where this is headed, so I won’t detail everything here.

Instead I’ll just share a few key talking points.  Here are some things I learned reading this book:

• We are more closely related to fungi than to plants.  Dawkins doesn’t venture a guess as to how long ago our ancestors parted ways with either, but suffice it to say it was less than 3.5 billion years ago and more than 1 billion years ago that each split took place.

• In theory, anyone living right now will have an 80% chance of being a so-called universal ancestor to everyone in the future.  Or really, your genes have an 80% survival rate.  I’ve heard that all modern people of European decent are theoretically directly rated to Charlemagne, but Dawkins does not touch on this.

• The eye has evolved independently in an estimated 40 to 60 species.  Creationists love to remind people that Darwin couldn’t wrap his mind around the evolution of the eyeball.  150 years later, Dawkins, with the aid of other scientists, has figured it out.

Buy The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The First Word by Christine Kenneally
The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher
Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley
The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright
Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters by Donald R Prothero
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin
Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus
Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade
The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition by Umberto Eco
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann 
Dead Men Do Tell Tales by William R. Maples and Michael Browning 

Other works by Richard Dawkins:

The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene 
A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
The Selfish Gene
Climbing Mount Improbable 
The God Delusion
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
River Out Of Eden: A Darwinian View Of Life 
Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing 
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution