Dawkins: The Ancestor's Tale

From Scienticity

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Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale : A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution; with additional research by Yan Wong. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 673 pages.

The first impression this book makes is one of mass: it is a massive volume and filled with weighty material. However, do not be intimidated: Dawkins' writing is lucid and his organization of the material skillfully presented. He has his ponderous moments, but he generally achieves his goal of conceptual and factual clarity.

His conceit is to emulate Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and take a pilgrimage back in time, tracing the evolution of human beings backwards through our tree of ancestor species to the beginning of life on Earth -- the ancestors are the pilgrims in this metaphor. At stops along the way, particularly at points where species diverged (or converged, in this reverse-time approach), he gives the narrative over to different pilgrims to tell their "story", revealing a bit at a time interesting parts of the story of evolution and how modern science has come to its current understanding.

Although the book is large, the individual stories are typically a few pages long and relatively self contained. So, the book can easily be read in small pieces over a long time period and yet the individual pieces still cohere into an unrivaled exposition of the subject.

-- Notes by JNS