Customer Reviews

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

5 star:		(142)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(18)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

A magnum opus from a scientist isn't common these days. Usually, their writings are in stacks of journal papers, with the occasional monograph highlighting a career. Journal articles remain buried in academic libraries, down the aisle from dusty tomes. Dawkins, however, is charged with the task of improving the "public understanding of science". With such a mandate, he is free to indulge in some innovative techniques. In this epic journey through time, he accomplishes that with his usual finesse. Add the lavish illustrations enhancing the text, and you have an outstanding depiction of evolution's saga.

Unlike most general surveys of evolution, this one offers some novel approaches. First, of course, is its structure. Instead of vague beginnings, Dawkins opens with a period familiar to all his readers - the scenes around us today. Moreover, that focus is on the part of Nature of most concern to us - "All Humankind". We like to consider ourselves the "point" of evolution? So be it, Dawkins declares, but warns that a change in outlook will likely result as you read this book. From that point, he begins to work backward in time. He stands Chaucer on his head by adding "pilgrims" to our journey at certain waypoints. The "pilgrims" are the Most Recent Common Ancestor of the present population of creatures. Since he begins with Homo sapiens, the most recent common ancestor, which Dawkins [rather, one of his graduate assistants] deems a "concestor", is of course the ancestor of today's chimpanzee.

It is a shock to most readers to learn we can make the traverse of nearly 4 billion years in but 39 steps [Hitchcock would have loved it!]. In tracing our mammalian ancestry, Dawkins is able to aid us in peering at the innermost secrets of our bizarre relatives. We meet colugos and tree shrews, mammoths with tusks like shovels, tarsiers and tigers. Nearly halfway along the track we are confronted with a superb essay on our nervous system. Using recent studies of the Platypus, we learn how our brain interacts with the rest of our bodies. A model human, proportioned to show how much our limbs are represented in the brain confronts us. Huge hands and lips extend from a minuscule torso perched on spindly legs. Our grasping abilities clearly helped drive the enlargement of that organ taking so much of our body's resources. In Platypus' case, the lips play the major role, since this creature uses its unusual properties to investigate its environment.

As we progress along the path, the information about our ancestors grows less certain. Is this creature in the proper genus? Is this miniature swimmer indeed unique in its classification? What is the divergent point between mammals and reptiles? With the introduction of reptiles, the birds finally join the trek. Dinosaurs, not being in the direct line leading to humans, are given short shrift. No matter, the books on these long-successful creatures are beyond counting - and the number grows constantly. Further back, he is able to introduce the unicellular world. It gives him an opportunity to explain the lifestyle of some of our planet's most fascinating life forms. Hair-trigger cells that capture food prey or ward off predators. Glorious, worm-like creatures "too good for a goddess", despite their human-derived appellation.

In his educational role, Dawkins must confront the insidious spread of Christian-inspired simplistic hype over evolution. He must take up space refuting its propaganda and invalid assumptions. With so much to cover, this is an unfortunate aside. Yet in dealing with their rants about "irreducible complexity", Dawkins demonstrates yet again that Darwinian principles provide the mechanisms for all life. The energy nodes in our cells, the mitochondria, he reminds us, are the vestiges of bacterial invaders, co-opted to a new role. Flagella, the great bugaboo of "intelligent design" adherents, are simply another chemical process. In his concluding way stations, Dawkins shows how these elements originally lived.

Although Dawkins notes throughout the book that science has a formidable task still ahead, with many mysteries to be resolved, this book will long endure. With its comprehensive scope coupled with the author's always compelling style, it belongs on every bookshelf. We need more such writers and their books. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Richard Dawkins has a wonderful writing style, and his name on a book is a guarantee of a witty, erudite, and lucid exposition on evolution and how it works. In this book he needs all of this literary artillery, not because he is arguing any contentious issues-in fact he's probably preaching to the choir for most readers-but because the work is lengthy, covers a wide range of topics, and does so in considerable detail.

The clever format of the work is a Chauceresque "pilgrimage" to the ancestor of all life, hence the title. Just as individuals join Chaucer's tale of Canterbury and entertain us with their personal tales, so too do the various life forms who join our trip back into time. The author picks certain species to clarify what new is introduced to the complexity of life ways at each bifurcation on the genetic tree. Throughout, he makes it very evident that this is not a tale of organisms but of the genes they contain, and he does a superb job of it. The reader is never allowed to forget what the point of the migration is.

I found some of Professor Dawkins' points particularly illuminating because he made things I thought I understood even clearer still. I also found the author's capacity to arrange such a massive amount of information in such a logical order, weaving in important details at key points, amazing to me. Although I know quite a lot of the information, I doubt I could have arranged it in anywhere near such a comprehensible order as the author has.

The problem with the work is that it is almost too detailed for the average reader-and this despite the fact that the author does not get drawn into discussing material he has covered in earlier works. With frequent references to his own titles and to those of others on specific topics, he manages to keep to his specified goal. Still, the work is a lengthy 614 pages, and it covers a lot of territory. It is almost encyclopedic. I have to admit, though, that should a beginner make an attempt to get through it, he/she would have a very clear and comprehensive understanding of the workings of evolution. For those with only a casual interest, this is probably more than you want to tackle. I am a fairly fast and persistent reader, and I had difficulty staying on track. I read the book in small increments, sometimes stopping in the middle of chapters. It required time to digest the new material or the new way of looking at old material.

One aspect of the book from which both the enthusiast and the casual reader will benefit, is the extensive bibliography. The books listed under "further reading" are current and diverse. Those from the general bibliography include both periodicals and books on specific topics. Some are a little dated, but all give a comprehensive coverage of discussions in evolutionary biology from which the reader may select follow-up information that more suits their level of and specific interests. All appear to be in English. Some of the journals may be difficult to find in public libraries, but all should be available in a large university library. Of those that I've read, Mark Ridley's Red Queen (1993) on the development of complex life forms and the enigma of sex and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (1991) on the serendipitous environmental factors affecting human diversity are my favorites. Although on cosmology rather than evolution, Sir Martin Rees' book, Just Six Numbers (1999), is also of interest.

For those not afraid of detail, I hardily recommend the book. For those who just want a basic understanding, I'd look for something a little simpler.

I have read every book by Richard Dawkins since I stumbled over "The Blind Watchmaker" -- an absolutely brilliant exposition of how evolution works -- a number of years ago, and have found him to be the clearest, most cogent and, for the lay reader, most enjoyable explainer of evolution and its works I have found. It is no accident that Dawkins holds an Oxford Chair as Professor of the Public Understanding of Science.

In "The Ancestor's Tale," taking the title from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," Dawkins takes us on a pilgrimage backward in time, describing the ancestors of mankind, starting with the first human farmers and Cro-Magnon man, and working back step by step to bacteria. In the course of this long tale, we are introduced to all classes of life and and their evolutionary connnections with us, as well as to many evolutionary concepts and issues. All in all, this is a fascinating and enjoyable book and well worth reading. I would have given it 5 stars except for the occasional gratuitous remark about the conduct of the United States in the world which is not within Dawkins' field of expertise.

One further point may be worth mentioning. Some of the early reviews criticized the"Ancestor's Tale" for failure to prove the theory of evolution, particularly the absence of a conscious "Designer." But the "Ancestor's Tale" is not written to defend the theory. Read other Dawkins works for that, particularly "The Blind Watchmaker."

Written in a lively fashion, Dawkins cleverly takes a reverse tack on presenting the story of evolution by going backwards in time, starting with humans and stopping at each "concestor" branch point, the first being the common ancestor of chimps and humans. The "tales" are not really stories about the individual concestors, but rather short essays on various aspects of evolutionary theory sometimes only rather tangentially related to the animal in question. For example, the "Lamprey's Tale" uses the type of hemoglobin found in lampreys to illustrate the idea of "taking the gene's perspective" (versus the organism's perspective)in evolution. But they are all well done, often with clever "morals," and very informative. Dawkins gives very short shrift to Gould's punctuated equilibrium theory, I think rather unfairly so, calling it "overrated." Certainly, for example, an alternative "Coelocanth's tale" would have been a perfect opportunity to discuss why some animals seem to change very little over time whereas others exhibit comparatively rapid evolution. But the book is very readable, much more so than Gould's Structure of Evolutionary Theory, though both are very much recommended for a full understanding of evolution.

Richard Dawkins's books are very well known, and they tend to arouse strong feelings: people who like them like them a lot, and people who dislike them dislike them a lot. In neither case is a review likely to have much influence on whether to buy them or read them. However, The Ancestor's Tale is not a typical Dawkins product, and is more in need of being reviewed than most of his recent books. For one thing it is much larger, the Weidenfeld and Nicolson version weighing in at more than 500 large pages, and the Houghton Mifflin version at more than 650 smaller pages. For another, although Dawkins's usual themes are present, it is much more of a descriptive book than the others, and less of a discussion. Perhaps most of all, it is published in two very different versions, and prospective purchasers need to be quite clear about which one they are buying before putting their money down (more of this below).

The Ancestor's Tale is a description of the evolutionary ancestors of humanity, and takes the form of a series of bifurcations, each one leading either to a human ancestor or to every other descendant. Dawkins takes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a background for his secular pilgrimage. At times the analogy appears a little strained, but in general it works well, especially in The Gibbon's Tale, where the textual variations between different manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales are used to explain how variations in DNA sequences between different organisms can be used to establish relationships between them.

Perhaps surprisingly, only 39 steps (another literary allusion, but one that Dawkins does not make explicit -- perhaps he was not an admirer of John Buchan in his youth) are needed to take us all the way back to the universal common ancestor -- ancestor alike of bacteria, archaea, fungi, plants and animals. Because we proceed backwards the organization of the book is heavily biassed towards the cousins we find more interesting: although there are, of course, exceptions, we tend to be more interested in our relationships with apes than with monkeys, more with monkeys than with other mammals, more with mammals than with other vertebrates, more with vertebrates than with invertebrates, and so on. So, although the organization is distinctly biassed from the point of view of more traditional ways of classifying organisms, it concentrates on what we most want to read about. A quarter of the way through the book we are still reading about primates, and, many pages later, the entire plant kingdom occupies one short chapter.

As noted above, the two versions of this book are very different. The Weidenfeld and Nicolson version (which may need a trip to Amazon.co.uk) is more expensive than the Houghton Mifflin version, but it is well worth the difference. Printed on high-quality paper, it is profusely and beautifully illustrated, with clear phylogenetic trees illustrating the relationships discussed in the text, and many colour photographs of the organisms discussed. The Houghton Mifflin edition is printed on paper of lower quality, and it lacks the colour illustrations; it can only be regarded as the cheap edition. Of course, if you only want Dawkins's text you can read it in either edition, but if you want the work as a whole you need to have the Weidenfeld and Nicolson edition.

OK, I know I shouldn't do this; but the frothy carping of the creationists is forcing me to say something.

I wonder if the creationist critics of Mr. Dawkins:

1. Have read his book
2. Can read English or understand basic logic
3. Can understand what science is and how it works

If your purpose in life is to shove your religious beliefs down other people's throats, then I guess logic, meaning, and science are not required. Remember everyone, this is science class, not comparative religions.

My jaw clunks off the desk every time I see creationists claim that Mr. Dawkins gives no evidence for his statements. Actually, he gives copious references to real hard scientific studies. He is not afraid of the evidence: all of it (all of it) - supports evolution by natural selection. What scientific evidence do creationists point to? "My mind is too weak to think of a way an eye evolved therefore, a miracle had to have occurred, the laws of nature were suspended and GOD designed the eye." Everywhere, the creationists will explain: "a miracle occurred here." Sorry, that doesn't count as science. No evidence supports the creationist position. The Bible (scientifically speaking) is evidence that some people wrote in Hebrew and Greek a long time ago and these writings have been passed down for a couple of millennia - and only that.

Faith is faith and should stay where it belongs, in church. When religious zealots want to replace science with their irrational myths, we had all better take note and be warned and fore-armed. If you want your kids to mouth driveling dogma, then let the creationist, anti-science cabal take over your schools. If you want them to be able to think, then wake up and act up.

Belief in a creator God and recognizing evolution by natural selection as the only plausible explanation for the evolution of humans, the diversity of life, the structure and processes of living things, the microbiology of living things, and the fossil record are NOT mutually exclusive - except to religious zealots. Even the Vatican accepts evolution.

The creationists would like you to swallow a doozie: some few thousand years ago, GOD created the earth [hey, let's experimentally test that one!] and "designed" every detail of every thing in it. GOD put all the fossils where they are, placed the radioactive elements in the matrix of rocks and fossils in just the right proportions so they would decay to today's time just right to fool us into thinking they are millions of years old, placed all the rock strata, put all the magnetic reversals arrayed on either side of the spreading sea floor ridges [oops, they don't actually spread, sorry], "designed" the meteorite impact craters like the one at the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula, "designs" earthquakes to punish sinners (they are not the result of plate tectonics): all this just to fool geologists and paleontologists. GOD "designed" the blind cave tetra without eyes (and "designed" the various species of Mexican tetra's with various levels of degeneration of their eyes), "designed" the flounder with eyes twisted around to one side [that's the way I'd figure an all-knowing, all-powerful "designer" would do it!] GOD "designed" the salamander and gull ring species so that they will interbreed everywhere in their ranges except where the two ends of the ring meet - where they have changed too much to recognize eachother. GOD "designed" the genome of all creatures and put all those genetic similarities across species, the unused DNA, the multiple gene copies, the random mutations in there just to fool arrogant, godless biologists like Mr. Dawkins. They want you to believe all the discoveries of modern science are just delusions, that all the hard evidence found by all the scientists around the world, over centuries, is "belief." (I could go on and on.) Yeah, baby. That there is science, the kind we'un's gots down in Texas, y'all!

Every one of the creationist criticisms of this book is irrational. I could quote so many; but this one is fine and exemplary: "Oh, and next time you are wondering why someone may have big lips, it's apparently because we descended from the platypus." Obviously, the writer didn't read the book or is not capable of understanding basic English and logic.

The creationists keep crying: no evidence, all just faith (remarkable criticism, that - it's their own situation)! As stated, ad nauseum, all the evidence supports evolution by natural selection, none of it supports the creationist's idea. I want them to give one actual experiment that supports their position. C'mon, you must have SOMETHING to support your position other than some venerable parchments from the middle east! Stop frothing a moment and give some evidence! Please, surprise me! Calling a biologist an "evolutionist," (as a criticism?!) is exactly analogous to calling a nuclear (not nucular, creationists!) physicist an, "atomist:" a person that "believes" in the "theory" of atoms.

Creationism: only for very weak minds, may be hazardous to your health, do not distribute to minors, file under Religion.

Oh yeah, Mr. Dawkins' book: it's wonderful, well-written, a fine read. A great overview of evolution by natural selection. It is also a good source of further reading, he points you to many other books. Don't be fooled by creationist drivel, it's a great book.

More years ago than I now care to admit, I spent part of a summer vacation struggling through a copy of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. I had bought it more from a personal dare to myself than from a real desire to plunge into a rather dry treatise on physical evolution. Publically buying a copy of Darwin's book was somewhat tantamount to flouting local morality in my southern Bible Belt community, and, as a young teenager, I was feeling rebellious. I remember being surprised that the store even had the book!

Contrasted with the tedious explanations in Darwin's seminal work, Dawkins' narrative in The Ancestor's Tale is positively delightful reading. The author is nearly as good a wordsmith as he is a scientist. His technique of designing his narrative along the lines of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is imaginative and catches the reader's fancy, and his occasional references to current political leaders and illiberal religious groups convey his knowledge of cultural and social trends as well as of the natural sciences.

Still, interesting as it is, The Ancestor's Tale is not to be considered light reading. Scientific taxonomy is not ignored, nor are descriptions of cellular structures and mechanics. The reader is often called upon to remember those long-ago high school and college courses in biology in order to grasp the meaning of the text, and in a few cases, I felt fortunate to come away with what I thought was the gist of a paragraph, for I was certain that its full implications had eluded my comprehension.

I did find the book to be a magnificent refresher of my fading knowledge of biological science, but, of even greater interest, I found that more than one belief encountered in my long-ago university courses has been replaced with more accurate interpretations of evolutionary events. For instance, I am utterly amazed to learn that the mitochondria, which are part and parcel of our living cells, were once independently living bacteria, and that another bacterium spins its flagellum in a ceaseless circular motion like the blades of a fan. My antiquated concepts of evolution were based on the prevailing science of forty years ago, when the fossil record seems to have been our most reliable method of investigating evolutionary change. Dawkins' book, on the other hand, details the evidence revealed by gene mapping, which is far more comprehensive and revealing than examination of the fossil record can ever be.

By the way, Dawkins' observations on mitochondria and on the bacterium Rhizobium also cleared up a quite unrelated mystery for me. Now I know the inspirational origins of the fictional "miticlorians" that are discussed in the motion picture "Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace" as well as the strange propulsion system that drives the ship carrying the Jedi knights and Jar Jar Binks through the core of the planet Naboo. What fun revelations!

I did find parts of Dawkins' book a bit of a climb, and I'm sure that bits of it even eluded my full comprehension here and there, but the view of evolutionary science when I finally reached the summit was well worth the effort to get there. As Agatha Christie's great detective Hercule Poirot might say, "This book, it gives the little gray cells something to work on."

The science is, of course, irrefutable - but what always strikes me with Richard Dawkins' work is the beauty of the writing. As ever, he presents complex issues with a grace and wit that never cease to give a fresh insight into the way the natural world came into being - not by the act of an all-knowing creator but through the wonderful simpicity of Darwinian evolution.

Like one of the other reviewers I feel this is a 4 star book, not quite up to Dawkins' usual standard, but have given the extra star to balance other reviewers who seem more intent on pushing a creationist agenda than enjoying the true beauty of the world around them.

This book is a good and entertaining read but it is sometimes takes you on an occasionally tedious ride through certain less interesting topics. This is unavoidable because of the breadth of what it covers. The content layout is simple and creative: Dawkins takes us step by step on a backwards-moving journey from modern homo sapiens back through each of its concestors (most recent common ancestor with another living animal or group of animals). In other words, from the common ancestor of chimps and humans to the beginning of creation. Given the subject, this book could have been very, very boring for your average non-paleontologist. The only reason it isn't is because of Dawkin's plain-speaking, conversational style, and the way his enthusiasm for the subject shines from the page. And, just to be clear, it is not just "not boring"; if you read this, expect to be "ooh-ed" and "ahh-ed" in various places just as you would from the best of science writing. That said, this book is a quicker read than its number of pages would imply, since you'll surely skim over the areas that have a little bit too much depth (for those planning on taking it along on their next 2-week holiday). No matter who you are or how much you love this topic, there are some parts that you will not have the patience to go through word for word. For instance, I simply could not deal with the pages on how certain worm-like creatures exude waste and from what hole, and I had to give that the quickest of skims. In Dawkin's defense, he wouldn't have been true to the layout of this book to have skipped over any point on our evolutionary line. (I'm sure there are areas he himself was less than enthusiastic about as he writing about them.) All in all, however, definitely worth a buy..

"If it's amazement you want," renowned, Oxford evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins writes in this 673-page celebration of the universe, "the real world has it all." Migrating jellyfish. Platypus radar and electric fish. Redwoods. Genetic similarities between hippos and whales. Peacock sexuality. Prehistoric rhino-sized rodents. "Not only is life on this planet amazing, and deeply satisfying, to all whose senses have not been dulled by familiarity: the very fact that we have evolved the brain power to understand our evolutionary genesis redoubles the amazement and compounds the satisfaction" (p. 612). And as for male baldness, lactose intolerance, wheat allergies, walking on two legs, and big brains, Dawkins' book brilliantly reveals that the life stories of every species are equally interesting, that evolution has not had its final word, and that the universe is not only about the Homo sapiens.

Just as history has been described as "one damn thing after another," in THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, Dawkins (THE SELFISH GENE, 1976) demonstrates that "evolutionary history can be represented as one damn species after another" (p. 1). He reveals that not only did life evolve "out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing," but that evolution "eventually led to beings capable of comprehending the process" (p. 613).

Modeling his tale after Chaucer's CANTERBURY TALES, and through the studies of archaelogy ("the study of bones, arrowheads, fragments of pots, oystershell middens, figurines and other relics that survive as hard evidence"), renewed relics ("records . . .which contain or embody a copy or representation of what is old"), and triangulation ("a method of judging distances by measuring angles") (p. 12), Dawkins takes his reader on a fascinating, epic journey through the past--a four-billion-year scientific "pilgrimage" to be exact, from the present to the very origin of life (p. 8). Along the way, and with all the piety and reverence the word "pilgrimage" suggests (p. 612), he introduces us to our knuckle-walking ancestors, including chimpanzees (according to Dawkins's calculations, 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), bonobos, gorillas, orang utans, gibbons and the Old World monkeys before arriving at "Canterbury," the ultimate origin of life (a bacterium, Thermus acquaticus, that existed more than three billion years ago).

Pity those readers who find nothing positive to say about this book, because there is great stuff here, brought to us by one of the greatest thinkers of our time. For its comprehensive lessons in evolution, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE should be required reading for all students. Impeccably erudite, yet written with a conversational voice and an unexpected political opinion or two (e.g., reflecting the author's dismay about America's indifferent bombing of the Baghdad museum containing 10,000-year-old relics while protecting the Ministry of Oil, Bush's pronunciation of "nuclear" as "nu-cu-lar," and Tony Blair's occasional Texas swagger), THE ANCESTOR'S TALE is highly recommended.

G. Merritt