The Ancestor's Tale
Hardcover edition
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| Author | Richard Dawkins |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Evolutionary biology |
| Publisher |
Houghton Mifflin (US) Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK) |
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Publication date
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2004 |
| Media type | Print, e-book |
| Pages | 673 pp. |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 56617123 |
| 576.8 22 | |
| LC Class | QH361 .D39 2004 |
| Preceded by | A Devil's Chaplain |
| Followed by | The God Delusion |
The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life is a 2004 popular science book by Richard Dawkins, with contributions from Dawkins' research assistant Yan Wong. It follows the path of humans backwards through evolutionary history, meeting humanity's cousins as they converge on common ancestors. Dawkins's longest book to date, it was nominated for the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books.
Richard Dawkins starts the tale by talking about history. He claims that evolution rhymes and patterns recur. He talks about our universe that has its own remarkable set of laws and constants which are capable of generating us and other organisms living on this planet. Not only it is capable of generating organisms, it is capable of evolving them too. He claims that biological evolution has no privilege line of descent and no designated end. Evolution has arrived at many millions of interim ends and organisms are still evolving. He believes that evolution is directional, progressive and even predictable. He also talks about how homo sapiens tend to think that they are more evolved than other, but that's not true, all the other species have gone through evolution too. They just have inherited different traits that helped them survive through natural selection. Dawkins claims that all species are equal. He uses backward chronology, instead of forward chronology because in backward chronology, no matter where you start, you end up celebrating the unity of life. While going forward just extols diversity. In a backward chronology, the ancestors of any set of species must eventually meet at a particular geological moment. The last common ancestor is the one that they all share which he calls "Concestor". The oldest concestor is the grand ancestor of all surviving life forms on this planet. There is a single concestor of all surviving life forms and its evidence is that all that have ever been examined share the same genetic code and the genetic code is too complex to have been invented twice. There is no sign of other independent origins of life and if new ones arise, they would probably be eaten by bacteria. This book is a pilgrimage to discover human ancestors and as it progresses, it meets other pilgrims (organisms) who join humans in order as the book reaches the common ancestor that human share with them. Human only passes 40 rendezvous before hitting the origin of life itself. In each rendezvous, we find one particular ancestor, the concestor which has the same labeling number as the rendezvous. All the creatures in this tale are alive except for 2 classes. The two exceptions are Dodo and Handyman. Dawkin’s book’s structure is inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. At each rendezvous point, Dawkins recounts interesting tales concerning the cousin animals which are about to join the band of pilgrims. Every newly recruited species, genus or family has its own peculiar features, often ones that are relevant to human anatomy or otherwise interesting for humans. For instance, Dawkins discusses why the axolotl never needs to grow up, how new species come about, how hard it is to classify animals, and why our fish-like ancestors moved to the land. These peculiar features are studied and analysed using a newly introduced tool or method from evolutionary biology, carefully woven into a tale to illustrate how the Darwinian theory of evolution explains all diversity in nature.
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