Customer Reviews

Ancestor's Tale

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As viewers of my profile may know: I'm a lazy reader & tend to 'cheat-read' books by getting the audio CD version, which has the virtue of being quicker and good for car journeys. In this case however, I have BOTH read AND listened to the book since the author had the foresight to provide good versions of both (which is surprisingly rare). Hence I have two reviews - this one and 'Imagine no Religion!' (see below).

The first thing that struck me about these CD's is that they are different to the book. Not only are they abridged but the language is changed to emphasize different points and to be more palatable to the ear. With reading the book, a lot of the stuff flew over my head (e.g. Cholanoflagellates) and I'm glad such things are abridged here.

The second is the presence of Lalla Ward, who seems to cover the large quotations Dawkins often uses in his works and also seems to read the more technical (or rather more mundane) parts of the tales. Having listened to the whole of Origin of Species, I am thankful that the narrator varies a bit as occasionally Dawkins can read things as known that are unknown to his wife (and so read differently).

In terms of content there is still the rich variety of tales (including my favourite: the Duck-billed Platypus) & I can only recall a few interesting Gambits which have been left out (e.g. Eve evolving 40,000 years before Adam & the Paedomorphosis of Man story).

My one criticism is that the Ancestor's tale is very detailed and involves lots of left-brain work. If you are listening to this in a car (or even typing a review!) then it is hard to fully follow the reasoning. Maybe this is because Men can't multi-task, but I'd be bold enough to suggest that even women may find this difficult...

To conclude then, audio CD's are often overlooked as a medium and it is to this one's credit that it is adapted to the ear, just as the book is adapted to the eye. If you know of anyone who hasn't read the book then I'd suggest giving them this as a starter, and the hard backed version of the book (with its shiny pictures) as a main course. As one of my fellow reviewers says: 1 copy of this book should be given to every member of mankind, to put the doubts about evolution to rest. Whatever you can do to play your part is to your credit.

***Imagine No Religion!****

Having read 3 or 4 Dawkins books, I get the distinct impression that he majors on 2 subjects: atheism and evolutionary biology. The great virtue of this book is that Dawkins is waxing lyrical about something he loves rather than something he hates (bar the final chapter) and hence shows what a great scientist he really is.

Whether this was intentional or not is hard to fathom but I feel that his magnum opus is Biology and the beauty of the wording combined with the immense depth of his research remind you of the flipside to this book - The God Delusion.

Before I started this book I was skeptical as to evolution and didn't believe in Bio or Abiogenesis. Since I have read it, I have found the measured tone and skillful combating of creationism in this book have won me over and I'm am now a far bigger fan of his than I was b4.

Of course, there is the last chapter where the supernatural is derided as not adding to the beauty of evolution. But even this chapter is measured and subtle, rather than polemnical.

As the cliche goes: if you don't believe in evolution, read this [Dawkins] book. But further to this, if you think Dawkins is Satan's son and is not an excellent scientist, then this book should also be top of your reading list rather than the latest CS Lewis...

Very ambitious journey through the whole of evolution. It's in 39 sections, working backwards in time to about 2000 million years, and ending with 'eubacteria'. For completeness this obviously needs geography - the generally-accepted changes in the earth, inclduing pangaea, laurasia, gondwanaland. It obviously also needs treatment of rocks and their changes, some of course (such as chalk) a by-product of life, some fossil-bearing. And oceanography. And climatology. Some is co-written by Dakwins' research assistant, Yan Wong.

With impeccable anthropocentricity, the various life forms are introduced in 'concestor' sequence - the neologism means going back in time until a common ancestor has been (probably) identified. Thus the accounts start with human prehistory - early types of man, then monkeys, apes, chimps. Each chapter has its branched diagram of the type that's existed more or less since Darwin, with 'today' at the top and the past at the bottom, dated from when the 'concestor' is believed to have separated evolutionarily. It's a hugely-prolonged family tree: for example, a few hundred million years ago we have a shrew, named 'Henry' by Dawkins, an ancestor of every human being alive today.

It's written, notionally, as a set of Canterbury Tales, though luckily each organism writes in modern English. 'The Host's Return' - a chapter near the end - is an interesting survey of devices which have evolved more than once. These are at the medium macro level, not the fine genetic detail - as an engineer might list the different types of engine, or different edged weapons, rather than things ike split pins or capillary tubing. Thus hopping vs quadruped motion has evolved twice; eyes of assorted types about fifteen times, echo location, electrical weaponry, echo location, throwing and spitting, a claim to have evolved a wheel...

Dawkins is good on etymology, evidently to ease the reader through the Latinate and Grecian neologisms. It's interesting to note the recapitulation of the history of science and of mores: British-derived names (Cambrian, Devonian..), Germanic material from the Jura mountains, the later US contributions - Pennsylvania and Mississippi, and now China, Japan, Australia. And conventions which used to include species named after aristocrats, now after humble taxonomists. Very likely there are Confucian interpetations ('neutral' genes? As opposed to fighting and dominant and recessive?)

A novelty - to the non-professional biologist - is the inclusion of modern genetic information taken from DNA, including diagrams showing relatedness. He makes it clear DNA is unpunctuated code. He explains it as not like a blueprint, but a sort of process, something like origami.

Omissions: the origins of life are more or less omitted (as are viruses). If life started in an soup of salts, carbon-chained molecules, acid ions, metal ions, and dissolved gas, and started to replicate, the beginnings must have been at the molecular level, something very difficult for us to imagine, as our senses are far too gross to easily picture these things. Surface tension, the electric fields around water molecules, growth by diffusion and osmosis in viscous liquids, gases dissolved by huge underwater pressures, enzymes, membranes a single molecule thick, shells a molecule thick, strengths of tiny structuress, the formation of complex metal based compounds (e.g. haemoglobin, chlorophyll), the molecular building-up of ice and snow molecules with their mysteriously generated symmetries ... all this sort of thing is not in The Ancestor's Tale; I think maybe Dawkins designed his book with the remotest past at the end, partly to avoid the thorny problems of origins.

Another omission is effects of physics at the D'Arcy Thompson macro level. Evolution recapitulating shapes (mammals returning to the sea evolving a fish shape; Bates on the Amazons finding a hummingbird the same shape as a hovering moth) for example I think are omitted.

There's not much on human genetics - for example, those people unable to digest alcohol, though he does mention cow's milk intolerance as a discussion on people having perhaps been domesticated, like dogs from wolves. The sort of things medical people necessarily know about - horrible deformities and mistakes, including man-made ones as by Americans in in Vietnam - are mostly omitted (except in fruit flies).

I have some negative comments, some of which will mean little to most people. In no particular order: (1) He says nothing about fake fossils, something of an industry in China now. Fakes have bedevilled evolutionary research. (2) The word 'syncitium' is misspelt also in the book as 'sincitium' - this type of structure (not the spelling!) is, or will turn out to be, important in relation to the brain. (3) Dawkins has a chapter on the coelacanth, a supposedly fossil deepwater fish, which unexpectedly turned up off the South African coast. It's a very short chapter, suggesting the idea that it was a precursor to mammals was dropped. (One of Dawkins' fellow Royal Institution lecturers said this fish was referred to as 'old four legs' by African blacks - an outrageous piece of nonsense). (5) There's a colour picture of an artist's impression of the supposed cell skeleton and endoplasmic reticulum, which are definitely phoney constructs. (6) Viruses are not included, which in fact in my view is sensible, as an awful lot of unsound nonsense - such as 'AIDS' - has grown up around them. (7) There's a misquotation from H G Wells' 'Anticipations' - basically the same one as in 'The God Illusion' - in which two parts have been swapped round, giving a false impression. (8) There are several pages on Colin Powell being called 'black' (this was before Obama!) and Dawkins thinks this says something about 'us' rather than the media. (9) The actual mechanics of dating rocks and fossils, and things relatively recently (carbon-14), is omitted, evading the considerable technical problems. (10) He assumes all the DNA material is correct, but in view of mistakes in modern biology there must be question marks over the techniques. (11) He gives no information on how 'similarity' between genomes is measured. For example the human genome may have been sequenced - Dawkins has a passage on whose exactly - but for chimps etc this has possibly not been done. Here's a problem: '.. we [he means people with DNA sequencing equipment] can measure the fraction that is associated with the regional groupings that we call [human] races. And it turns out to be a small percentage of the total: between 6 and 15 per cent depending on how you measure it...' This is surely a preposterous argument. Human beings have 46 chromosomes. 6 to 15% difference could mean up to 8 entire chromosomes being different! If that's negligible, I'm a Tasmanian Tiger.

This is another great read by Richard Dawkins. His knowledge of the plant and animal world nicely illustrate a walk back in time, reviewing the common ancestors of man, as if they were pilgrims telling tales in Chaucers "Canterbury Tales". For anyone interested in the greatest show on Earth (Evolution), this is another great installment of that fabulous tale. A must read for all those who truly appreciate life and the scientific endeavor.