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The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution Hardcover – January 1, 2004
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- Print length673 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHoughton Mifflin Harcourt
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 2004
- Dimensions6.25 x 1.75 x 9 inches
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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 Publishers Weekly
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Review
"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 is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.
From The Washington Post
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.
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- Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 0 edition (January 1, 2004)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 673 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0618005838
- ISBN-13 : 978-0618005833
- Item Weight : 2.05 pounds
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- Best Sellers Rank: #380,791 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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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 Ancestor's Tale, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and A Devil's Chaplain. Dawkins lives in Oxford with his wife, the actress and artist Lalla Ward.
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Minor negatives include the lack of blank end papers for reader notes and also the lack of a glossary. Due to the various ways that words are defined and used by natural historians, often differing even within the discipline itself, all natural history books ought, in my view, contain a glossary. One does notice that Dawkins, being British, does make use of the Oxford English Dictionary. But not everyone has easy access to this monument of verbiage. Also, it would seem to me that a dictionary specific to science is often more appropriate. Scientists, when thinking rigorously, use some words differently, e.g., "fact" and "theory" which zoologists as Dawkins and other natural historians have generally not yet fully accepted.
I have noticed, however, in Dawkins' later work that, unlike many Evolutionists, Dawkins does recognize the difficulty regards "homology" and its various definitions. In this current book under review, "homology" is not much, if at all, apparent. Dawkins realizes that one can't use homologies to demonstrate common descent if common descent is automatically implied as part of the definition itself. The notion that "sameness" (i.e., Darwin's morphological "homology") of morphologies or genomes can only be originated by common ancestry is an idea that has never been demonstrated but what Evolutionists must do. It's unfortunate that Dawkins' contemporaries have muddled the definition of "homology" and thus made it but another candidate for the "dumpster of words of words redefined by Evolutionists so as to become all but useless."
In the view of Naturalistic Parallelism which this reviewer subscribes to, it is apparent early on where Dawkins does join with his fellow Evolutionists and thus begins also to go wrong. A primary assumption of Evolutionists is that the origins of life, especially of the genetic code, was so difficult that it could have occurred but once. Dawkins thus writes (p.7):
"We can be very sure there really is a single concestor [Dawkins' term for "common ancestor"] of all surviving life forms on this planet. The evidence is that all that have ever been examined share (exactly in most cases, almost exactly in the rest) the same genetic code; and the genetic code is too detailed, in arbitrary aspects of its complexity, to have been invented twice [....]. As things stand, it appears that all known life forms can be traced to a single ancestor which lived more than 3 billion years ago. If there were other, independent origins of life, they have left no descendants that we have discovered [....]"
I disagree with this fundamental assumption of Evolutionists. Evolutionists themselves often disagree regards a singularity of origins and suggest, as Darwin did at first, that there may have been several initial progenitors. But such allowance of more than one progenitor refutes their own arguments regards sameness as supposedly demonstrating common ancestry. Thus Dawkins, it would seem, has no choice but to choose a singularity of origins. But then, Dawkins may have partially recanted on this in his final chapter where he writes (p.560):
"Darwin probably (and in my view rightly) saw the origin of primitive life as a relatively (and I stress relatively) easy problem compared with the one he solved: how life, once begun, developed its amazing diversity, complexity and powerful illusion of good design."
Its unfortunate that Dawkins doesn't see that the "amazing diversity, complexity and powerful illusion of good design" were undoubtedly mostly there globally, from the beginning, having originated in the fundamental laws of nature and the complexities of the already existing material world. I thus disagree with the fundamental assumption of Dawkins and of Evolutionists in regards to the necessity of all continuing life emanating from a single concestor. A fundamental assumption of Naturalistic Parallelism is rather that the origination of cellular organic material and of DNA / RNA was not singular but rather global. Life and genetic codes originated gazillions (i.e., magnitudes exceeding zillions --- a very large number) of times with zillions of corresponding parallel developments over the eons. I believe that this is what fossil carbon tracings of 3.8 billion years ago demonstrate. This evidence of global biogenesis was noted by Elso Barghoorn and others as far back as the 1970s. Obviously, Natural Selection was a factor early on, even preceding life itself.
While Dawkins is wrong from the start in choosing false assumptions (and an incredibly bad understanding of scientific "fact"), Dawkins nevertheless presents some of the data of Earth's history in an otherwise magnificent and interesting manner. Dawkins hypothetical journey begins with humans as his "Rendezvous 0: All Humankind." He presents his case for the hypothesized 40 rendezvous in total, ending with "Rendezvous 39: Eubacteria." Along the way, Dawkins presents a great deal of interesting information in a quite adept manner: a description of rooted and unrooted family trees and cladistics; other information, pro and con, regards the methodologies used by systemists; the difficulties and challenges of DNA systematics; the ecology of the various time periods; the dinosaur extinctions that occurred about 65 m.y.a. at the KT boundary and the speculations regards the causes; and numerous other informative discussions. As the book is the story of Evolution, it is of course the story of alleged genetic relationships of all organic beings throughout time. In this regards, Dawkins clearly elucidates and incorporates the work of Yale statistician, Joseph Chang, author of "Recent Common Ancestors of All Present Day Individuals" (which leads ultimately to Dawkins' "Rendezvous 0"). Similarly, Dawkins discusses molecular phylogeny. Unfortunately, in both these areas, while Dawkins goes considerably further than most Evolutionists in consideration of underlying assumptions, in the end he is far too accepting of these assumptions and far too lacking of skepticism regards the unknowns in each of these areas that he touches upon. Nevertheless, Dawkins is an unparalleled master of information and, using the organization structure imposed by Evolution --- false and not reflective of reality and the universality of universal laws though such structure may be --- Dawkins is adept at communicating in an interesting manner. His use of 40 rendezvous points representing hypothesized common ancestors is a marvelous means of communicating natural history within the advocacy of his belief structure, Evolution.
Regards this last point, it's been over 150 years since Darwin and no common ancestor has yet been identified in the fossil record. Only intermediaries --- and one artificial genetic reconstruction that I am aware of, Urbilateria (as discussed by Sean B. Carroll; also mentioned by Dawkins) --- are even alleged. One might ask, Who needs Santa Claus, the Great Pumpkin of Halloween, or supernaturalistic entities to believe in when one can have the fun of the fairy tales of large numbers of mythical, unidentified common ancestors?
All but the first and last of the 40 rendezvous points are each represented as a vertical Evolutionary tree running down the side of a page and converging, on the journey back in time, to the relevant hypothesized concestor (i.e., common ancestor) near the page bottom. "Rendezvous 0, All Humankind," while indicating a supposed "Concestor 0" for humans, also interestingly presents many additional roots back in unrooted trees. This is consistent with Evolutionists' notion of species. I.e., in Evolution theory (and also NP) there is no distinct transition from what we artificially define as the species Homo sapiens and some other example of Homo sapiens' predecessors. Rather, whatever their nature, transitions are continuous. Thus, there is in Evolution theory a supposed human common ancestor that allegedly lived about 30 thousand years ago, what Dawkins labels "Concestor 0" of all modern day humans as per the statistical work of Chang et. al. Then, proceeding further back in time toward "Rendezvous 1, Chimpanzees", about six million years ago we are led to "Concestor 1", the hypothesized common ancestor between what we consider to be modern humans and chimps. "Concestor 2" is the hypothesized rendezvous with gorrillas; "Concestor 3" is the hypothesized rendezvous with orangutans; etc. "Rendezvous 39, Eubacteria", like Rendezvous 0 is represented differently and, in this case, as a star diagram. This last rendezvous represents a commingling of microbes. (In NP theory, such representation would be much more global and not dependent upon singularities of origins.)
What Dawkins probably doesn't realize nor intend is that, with such a graphic presentation as depicted for Rendezvous 1 to 38, he comes very close to making the case for Parallelism as the better theory. That is, if one were to replace the bottom portion of each chart and instead leave the supposed ancestry lines leading back separately, i.e., as an unrooted tree, then one has removed a great deal of hypothesization thereby presenting the more parsimonious solution. That is, as one looks at any one of the trees with a vertical length representing tens or hundreds of millions of years of history, one is readily able to visualize how much of the tree represents actual known reality and how much is hypothetical. Conclusive reality can only be represented by two categories: the extant beings (including their history known through human writings, archaeological findings, and other scientific inferences) that are represented by a very tiny portion of the top of one of Dawkins' typical charts and, secondly, by fossils, archaeological relics, radiometric dating and other scientific inferences. Contrary to Dawkins' apparent epistemology, "inferences" are not a priori "facts". All representations of convergences of the fossil data to common ancestors are entirely hypothetical, not indicated or necessary, and thus not scientifically parsimonious. Without such speculation, the data is more scientifically represented with vertical parallel lines. "Rendezvous 39: Eubacteria," the final rendezvous is better represented by a global web of life as based on the work of Carl R. Woese and others rather than by singularities. That is, "Rendezvous 39: Zillions of Global Eubacteria" would seem to be a more appropriate title. It is here, early on, that the origination hox genes, DPMs (dynamic patterning modules of Stuart Newman) may have begun. Under this scenario, symbiosis is, or soon will be, a global phenomena. Etc.
The charts that Dawkins has provided would seem to make the distinction between the proverbial "Intermediaries" and "Common Ancestors" quite clear. Intermediaries, one would think, would be restricted to particular fossils that are alleged to correspond to lineages and the long parallel lines proceeding down the page. Only at a single point at the bottom of each chart is a supposed concestor (i.e., common ancestor) explicitly speculated. But even Dawkins and Darwin aren't above providing some confusion regards intermediaries and common ancestors. While Dawkins generally seemed to distinguish between intermediaries and common ancestors, in this passage from "The Salamander's Tale" the distinction has been blurred (p.303):
"Many of our legal and ethical principles depend on the separation between Homo sapiens and other species. [.....M]any are unthinking meat-eaters, and have no worries about chimpanzees being imprisoned in zoos and sacrificed in laboratories. Would they think again, if we could lay out a living continuum of intermediates between ourselves and chimpanzees, linked in an unbroken chain of interbreeders like the Californian salamanders? Surely they would. Yet it is the merest accident that the intermediates all happen to be dead. It is only because of this accident that we can comfortably and easily imagine a huge gulf between our two species --- or between any two species, for that matter."
The reference is to an extant ring-species of salamanders consisting of several extant subspecies of salamanders. One wonders, in this analogy, is Dawkins suggesting that chimpanzees and humans are ancestral to each other? That is, does he think it would be informative to extend his salamander analogy and similarly consider man and chimp as each being a subspecies of a species? This species might, perhaps, be labeled "chimp-people". Thus, just as we all know that a salamander is a salamander, we would also consider a chimp-person to be a chimp-person. (Now, now --- Don't be pedantic. Dawkins has a chapter titled, essentialistically, "Ape-Man". If Dawkins can teach Creationists that one of our ancestors, apparently a non-specified concestor between his Concestor 3 and Concestor 4, is an archetypical Ape-Man, then surely this reader might use a more politically correct archetypical "Chimp-Person" in lieu of Dawkins' "Concestor 1".) But one also realizes that Dawkins knows better and that the salamander's tale was just one of those interesting stories Dawkins needed to tell. (On the other hand, in a later work (2009) Dawkins does point out the samenesses of a baby chimp and humans.)
Darwin had some similar thoughts highlighting the possible confusion between supposed intermediaries and supposed common ancestors. In his chapter in ORIGINS OF SPECIES titled "Imperfection of the Geological Record," Darwin wrote (1859; p.293):
"In the first place it should always be borne in mind what sort of intermediate forms must, on my theory, have formerly existed. I have found it difficult, when looking at any two species, to avoid picturing to myself, forms DIRECTLY intermediate between them. But this is a wholly false view; we should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor; and the progenitor will generally have differed in some respects from all its modified descendants."
Perhaps it is excusable that Darwin "found it difficult" but surely if the evidence for intermediaries and ancestors were as certain as modern Evolutionists would have us believe, there ought no longer be any difficulty whatsoever regards the identification of the alleged common ancestor of any two species.
At least it is known, in the Evolutionist's view, alleged intermediates are far more numerous than alleged common ancestors, i.e., Dawkins "Concestors." Of course it could be, in the previous quote by Dawkins, that Dawkins is alleging no differing intermediates between extant chimpanzees and the supposed common ancestor of humans and chimps. That is, it could be that Dawkins is making a speculation regards man and chimp that chimps are the common ancestor of the two. Thus the speculation would be that chimps have remained unchanged for the 6 million years that is speculated to have been the time since divergence. Darwin allowed for such a possibility of what, I suppose, might be considered "living fossil common ancestors" (1859; p.293):
"It is just possible by my theory, that one of two living forms might have descended from the other; for instance, a horse from a tapir; and in this case direct intermediate links will have existed between them. But such a case would imply that one form had remained for a very long period unaltered, whilst its descendants had undergone a vast amount of change; and the principle of competition between organism and organism, between child and parent, will render this a very rare event; for in all cases the new and improved forms of life will tend to supplant the old and unimproved forms."
A tapir is "any of several large, hog-like mammals of tropical America and the Malayan peninsula: tapirs have flexible snouts, feed on plants, and move about at night" (Webster's dictionary). The dictionary also notes tapirs are about three feet high at the shoulder. For our purposes, the important concept is that tapirs are extant contemporaries of modern horses just as chimps are of humans.
Ah, but not so fast. Less we allow the reality of there being no fossil evidence between an alleged human-chimp common ancestor and the modern chimp --- less we allow this reality to accuse Dawkins of not believing that man and chimps do indeed share a common ancestor of some different species rather than a living fossil common ancestor, we have this from Dawkins (p.309):
"Evolution is now universally accepted as a fact by thinking people, so one might have hoped that essentialist [belief in ideal archetypes representing each species] intuitions in biology would have been finally overcome. Alas, this hasn't happened. Essentialism refuses to lie down. In practice, it is usually not a problem. Everyone agrees that Homo sapiens is a different species (and most would say a different genus) from Pan troglodytes, the chimpanzee. But everyone also agrees that if you follow human ancestry backward to the shared ancestor and then forward to chimpanzees, the intermediates all along the way will form a gradual continuum in which every generation would have been capable of mating with its parent or child of the opposite sex."
However, we must weigh this quote from Dawkins with two earlier statements by Dawkins that give weight to my suggestion that Evolutionists do indeed believe the essentialistic idea that the chimp is a living fossil common ancestor, or at least might come to that conclusion as based upon the weight of the evidence and lack thereof. In his "Rendezvous 1: Chimpanzees" where all humankind is supposedly joined with chimps, we have this (p.100):
"As we approach Rendezvous 1, then, the chimpanzee pilgrims are approaching the same point from another direction. Unfortunately we don't know anything about that other direction. Although Africa has yielded up some thousands of hominid fossils or fragments of fossils, not a single fossil has ever been found which can definitely be regarded as along the chimpanzee line of descent from Concestor 1."
In other words, the alleged human link to chimps via a (supposed non-archetypical) common ancestor is entirely theory driven and there is no real fossil evidence for such a link. Even more, this lack of evidence continues with the alleged joining of gorillas in the alleged next rendezvous point (p.106):
"Unfortunately there are no fossils to bridge the gap between Concestors 2 and 1, nothing to guide us in deciding whether Concestor 2, which is perhaps our 300,000-great-grand-parent, was more like a gorilla or more like a chimpanzee or, indeed, more like a human. My guess would be chimpanzee, but this is only because the huge gorilla seems more extreme, and less like the generality of apes."
Well, don't despair, dear Evolutionists. Surely by the time we get back to the one hundred millionth great-grand-parent evidence will become more certain. (I am facetious.) In the meantime, it would seem to me that the somewhat more parsimonious, and therefore the somewhat more scientific, hypothesis is that chimps and gorillas are indeed living fossil common ancestors of humans. This hypothesis regards living fossil common ancestors has the advantage of apparently already being accepted by authority figures. The publisher, Gramercy / Random House, of my 1979 reprint of Darwin's ORIGINS OF SPECIES, for example, has placed on the cover the now standard 5-hominid depiction that students all over the world would have no choice but to interpret in any other manner than as implying linear descent of man from ape (as opposed to Darwin's actual hypothesis of common descent). Surely, book editors, publishers, and advertising executives wouldn't lead us astray. (I am being facetious.)
More seriously, one further point needs to be made regards what one ought to expect the fossil record to demonstrate as based upon theory. Where Dawkins' representation of common ancestors as single points may be useful to his organizational scheme, such representation can be misleading. Evolutionists generally believe that it is not individual organisms that evolve. Rather, according to standard belief, it is entire populations that evolve. Speciation, according to ET, occurs when populations separate into two or more populations and thus evolve distinctly. Dawkins mentions this aspect of ET in his "Tale" regards several species of narrowmouth frogs but ignores the implications (p.311):
"As with any two species, there must have been a time when they were one. Something separated them: to use the technical term, the single ancestral species 'speciated' and became two. It is a model for what happens at every branch point in evolution. Every speciation begins with some sort of initial separation between two populations of the same species. It isn't always a geographical separation, but, as we shall see in the Cichlid's Tale, an initial separation of some kind makes it possible for the statistical distribution of genes in the two populations to move apart. This usually results in an evolutionary divergence with respect to something visible: shape or colour or behavior. In the case of these two populations of American frogs, the western species became adapted to life in drier climates than the eastern, but the most conspicuous differences lies in their mating calls."
Everyone recognizes what might be termed inheritable variation. Furthermore, there are no inconsistencies with such differing "species" in terms of the fossil record. Essentially, "a frog is a frog is a frog." The difficulty comes in extending this idea of speciation to, say, Dawkins implied concestor of frogs and salamanders. The fossil record doesn't support many differing varieties of "frogmanders." That is, with ET large numbers of lineages are implied at and after the alleged speciation divergence that aren't accounted for in the fossil record. (I.e., concestors are not hypothesized to be singularities.) Dawkins makes no account of these many lineages; nor does the fossil record. With NP theory there are no "frogmanders" needing to be accounted for but rather only continual transitions from origins of life forward.
Thus, the even more parsimonious hypothesis and hypothesis that is reflective of the fossil record states that there are no common ancestors. Rather, all lineages remain independent. This latter is what a naturalistic, scientific view compels me personally to accept. Naturalistic Parallelism is what the evidence best demonstrates. Parallelism also avoids the essentialism that Dawkins discusses in that modern species can be identified as entities with histories, i.e., their lineages. This history of each modern day organism, beginning with the organism as known by its associated species name, continues back through history to the Cambrian, pre-Cambrian, and on back to the organism's genomic, cellular, biotic, and prebiotic origins --- or at least to the organism's genomic origins which undoubtedly developed in parallel with zillions of other members of the species and gazillions of other organisms of different species. Clearly, phenotypes (but not necessarily genotypes) of today differ from those of eons past.
GLOSSARY NOTE: The distinction regards the understanding of "parallel" and its derivatives as used in NP (Naturalistic Parallelism or just Parallelism) theory --- the distinction needs to be emphasized from the usage of "parallel" in ET (Evolution theory). In the latter, the terms "parallel evolution" and "convergent evolution" assume a certain parallelism (as understood from the secular meaning of "parallel") but only so far as this parallelism (genotypically and phenotypically in the former; phenotypically in the latter) extends, maximally, back to an alleged common ancestor. In NP theory there are no common ancestors. Thus the secular notion of "parallel" extends much further back to the supposed global origins of the genetic code.
REFERENCE NOTES: In my review of Ernst Mayr's THIS IS BIOLOGY,' q.v., I have indicated some references that would be appropriate to this review also. To that list I add here a few more references of note. First, the science reporter, Suzan Mazur, has been a particularly rich source of references regards creative scientific thinkers. See Mazur's website, www-suzanmazur-com and also her book, THE ALTENBERG 16: AN EXPOSE OF THE EVOLUTION INDUSTRY (2009). The book contains excerpts that were taken from the website. Gerd B. Muller headed up the Altenberg project. See the anthology he coedited with Stuart A. Newman, ORIGINATION OF ORGANISMAL FORM: BEYOND THE GENE IN DEVELOPMENTAL AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY (2003). Here, Newman's essay regards DPM (dynamic patterning modules) is particularly fascinating. Another anthology by Roger Milkman is also of interest, PERSPECTIVES ON EVOLUTION (1982). Note that among the 11 essays of this later is one by Stephen Jay Gould that explains the meaning of the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium that Gould and Niles Eldredge developed in the early 1970s. Milkman's own essay, "Toward a Unified Selection Theory" is also of interest as are the other essays. THE NATURAL SELECTION OF THE CHEMICAL ELEMENTS (1996) by R.J.P. Williams and J.J.R. Frausto da Silva provide some fascinating insights into pre-biotic possibilities, including likely origination of bacteria flagella.
Note that all of the above authors, as far as I am aware as of this date, continue to hold to the core idea of Evolution, common descent, and rather question Natural Selection theory. It is typical to question whether or not NS when coupled with chance mutations is enough to cause speciation. It is generally recognized that NS isn't causal but rather a result. That is, "selection can only work on what already exists" (Muller). Chance mutations and NS aren't adequate regards originations of phenotypes. Interestingly, similar arguments were well put forward by St. George Mivart long ago in his ON THE GENESIS OF SPECIES ([1871], 2010). While Mivart occasionally subscribes to teleological causation, such views don't get in the way of his otherwise naturalistic perspective. (I suspect a certain amount of teleology is part of the job description for a future Saint.) Mivart presents some marvelous naturalistic arguments that continue to this day. Mivart writes (p.9):
"The special Darwinian hypothesis [....] is beset with certain scientific difficulties, which must by no means be ignored, and some of which, I venture to think, are absolutely insuperable. What Darwinism or 'Natural Selection' is, will be shortly explained; but before doing so, I think it well to state the object of this book, and the view taken up and defended in it. It is its object to maintain the position that 'Natural Selection' acts, and indeed must act, but that still, in order that we may be able to account for the production of known kinds of animals and plants, it requires to be supplemented by the action of some other natural law or laws as yet undiscovered."
I certainly agree. Furthermore, two additional marvelous works are advanced by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Muller that similarly enlighten us regards questions of today that were also discussed long ago. Julian Huxley's EVOLUTION: THE MODERN SYNTHESIS was first published in 1942 and has a 2010 Forward by Pigliucci and Muller. While I will always hold a diminished view of Huxley elsewhere initiating the equating of scientific "theory" (i.e., heliocentricism, of gravity, Evolution, etc.) with "fact", I do find his writing in this book marvelously inspirational. A companion volume, EVOLUTION: THE EXTENDED SYNTHESIS (2010), is an anthology edited by Pigliucci and Muller that contains 17 essays by twenty different modern thinkers. While all these authors are looking for concepts beyond natural selection as causal agents, NP theory understands that even with additional causal factors, speciation does not result. Speciation has already occurred parallely as a result of global biogenesis and the later originations of the full genetic codes.
Finally, don't dismiss out-of-hand Louis Agassiz's ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION ([1857], 2004). Ignoring Agassiz's Creationist tendencies, as was typical of the era, one might nevertheless find numerous naturalistic and plausable alternatives to Darwin's arguments such as regards geographical distributions, samenesses between organisms, and so forth. Agassiz's call for standards in science is also laudable and brings to mind, especially in regards to definitions, the possible usefullness of hierarchies (coupled with a "dumpster" of words that have become too confused to be of continued use).
This book explores the questions of how we came to be, how all life is related, how life began, and what would happen if it had to start over again. It is a jaw-dropping achievement (and I learned that our jaws are a reuse of gill structures on p.403).
Rich Dawkins also wrote "The Selfish Gene" long ago. His views at the time were the subject of scientific controversy, and he pulled no punches with some of his fellow scientists in promoting his thesis. Decades later, it seems that his views on Darwinism have become widely accepted, and the tone of Ancestor's Tale seems nicer, more mellow, and filled with love and wonder. Now he reserves his biting criticisms only for non-scientific religious types -- the creationists.
I am not sure whether it was the authors' intent, but I am convinced more than ever that complex, intelligent life exists all throughout the universe. After all, the process by which it arose here was not an unlikely accident or a miracle, but the result of never-ending competition and adaptation.
We are all used to the evolutionary trees that show some shapeless blobs at the roots and 'man' right at the top on a branch that splits from 'ape' who don't rise nearly as high, dog and elephant on the lower branches, fish much lower, insect even lower still. It makes us feel good, well-evolved if we accept 'evolution' and at the conclusion of a process that began one or two billion years ago and culminated with our kids. But... Dawkins observes, it just happens that every single living organism today happens to be at the top of an evolutionary process that probably began one or two billion years ago (unless life came upon Earth through life-seeds carrying stardust). In other words, man, whale, butterfly, amoeba, starfish, we all happen to be the product of an unimaginably long process.
In Ancestor's Tale, Dawkins writes one of 10 million possible books that go back in time, tracing the ancestry of our species not because we are 'the best' or 'the most' but for the same reason most of us are more interested in our own family's genealogy than we are in our neighbor's. The book begins with today's humans and goes back in time all the way to the beginning of life, stopping here and there at the points (he counts 40) where 'splits' took place. For example, humans and chimpanzees split from a common ancestor a couple million years ago, going farther back, there was a common ancestor to the branch that produced us (humans and chimps) and gorillas, prior to that we (future gorillas, chimps and humans) split from orangutans and so it goes, down to some primordial, self-replicating organic soup.
But... wait... that would be too simple, right? There are 'genes' that tell the cells in our body (if we stay within the small branch of life that comprises multi-cellular forms) what to become and how to behave and, Dawkins observes, a totally different tale could be written from the point of view of any particular gene, many of them, present in almost identical form among many species. And it gets a lot more complicated than that when we begin trying to understand what's happening inside a cell, how cells ended up being that way, appreciating how unbelievably improbable both the complex cells that make up our bodies and their associations to form complex life forms happen to be.
Whether you are a Darwinist or not, and Dawkins is one, the Ancestor's Tale should be an important to read book for anyone curious enough to explore the whats, hows and whys of existence. The author has the ability to present the outcomes of the incredibly clever and complex work biologists do these days. He presents it all in ways that those of us who couldn't tell DNA from RNA would understand if not in every single detail at least at a level for being able to form a 'big picture' of biological existence.
And here comes the fair warning. Dawkins is a proud Darwinist and an atheist. He is fully convinced that 'evolution' is what made us to be the way we are and that there is nothing miraculous in the way 'matter' organized itself ti form 'life' way back then. And Dawkins is not an apologist. When scientific facts on his side he happily and sometimes harshly attacks what he views as the opposition - the intelligent designers. He views them as lazy and uncurious and he is not afraid to say so. And, like most of us humans, Dawkins has his own political and moral views. His occasional comments on issues such as 'war', mass entertainment or on contemporary politicians could make a reader laugh and nod in approval or throw the book away and vow to never again read anything 'Dawkins'. The latter would be a mistake because the parts that deal the the main topic of the book - walking back on the evolutionary path that brought us - are all well sourced and well presented.
Not only a history book of the human species and its ancestors, Dawkins's is an excellent introduction to the scientific method. In dozens if not hundreds of instances Dawkins not only presents the facts and the conclusions but he brings us everything to the level of understanding expected from a reasonably well-read non-biologist. He gives us the connections, the research, how the scientists arrived at the conclusions they did, what the opposition had to say and so on. It's fascinating.
I would not call The Ancestor's Tale a must read because nothing is but I would dare call it an essential read for biologists and non-biologists alike. Galileo changed the way we viewed our place in the Universe from 'central' to somewhere oh the periphery. Dawkins does something similar to our species, even better, to multi-cellular life, generally view as the top of existence or creation. And if you thought you knew for sure what 'species', 'cell' and 'life' where, read the book and expect to be surprised if not startled.
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