Product Description

With unparalleled wit, clarity, and intelligence, Richard Dawkins, one of the world's most renowned evolutionary biologists, has introduced countless readers to the wonders of science in works such as The Selfish Gene. Now, in The Ancestor's Tale, Dawkins offers a masterwork: an exhilarating reverse tour through evolution, from present-day humans back to the microbial beginnings of life four billion years ago. Throughout the journey Dawkins spins entertaining, insightful stories and sheds light on topics such as speciation, sexual selection, and extinction. The Ancestor's Tale is at once an essential education in evolutionary theory and a riveting read.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4244 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-02
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 688 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
Just as we trace our personal family trees from parents to grandparents and so on back in time, so in The Ancestor's Tale Richard Dawkins traces the ancestry of life. As he is at pains to point out, this is very much our human tale, our ancestry. Surprisingly, it is one that many otherwise literate people are largely unaware of. Hopefully Dawkins's name and well deserved reputation as a best selling writer will introduce them to this wonderful saga.

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 us—our 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
The diversity of the earth's plant and animal life is amazing—especially when one considers the near certainty that all living things can trace their lineage back to a single ancestor—a bacterium—that lived more than three billion years ago. Taking his cue from Chaucer, noted Oxford biologist Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, etc.) works his way narratively backward through time. As the path reaches points where humanity's ancestors converge with those of other species—primates, mammals, amphibians and so on—various creatures have tales that carry an evolutionary lesson. The peacock, for example, offers a familiar opportunity to discuss sexual selection, which is soon freshly applied to the question of why humans started walking upright. These passages maintain an erudite yet conversational voice whether discussing the genetic similarities between hippos and whales (a fact "so shocking that I am still reluctant to believe it") or the existence of prehistoric rhino-sized rodents. The book's accessibility is crucial to its success, helping to convince readers that, given a time span of millions of years, unlikely events, like animals passing from one continent to another, become practically inevitable. This clever approach to our extended family tree should prove a natural hit with science readers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Scientific American
In this expansive book, Dawkins, the well-known evolutionary biologist and author (The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, A Devil's Chaplain, among others), gives us an eloquent treatise on evolution, ne-glecting neither the latest developments nor his own provocative views. As the title suggests, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales provides the model for the book's conceit--a pilgrimage back through four billion years of life on earth. We join with other organisms at rendezvous points where we find common ancestors, until we arrive at the "grand ancestor of all surviving life." As Dawkins explains: "Backward chronology in search of ancestors really can sensibly aim towards a single distant target ... and we can't help converging upon it no matter where we start--elephant or eagle, swift or salmonella, wellingtonia or woman.... Instead of treating evolution as aimed toward us, we choose modern Homo sapiens as our arbitrary, but forgivably preferred, starting point for a reverse chronology.... Following Chaucer's lead, my pilgrims, which are all the different species of living creatures, will have the opportunity to tell tales along the way to their Canterbury, which is the origin of life. It is these tales that form the main substance of this book."

Editors of Scientific American (202)

Customer Reviews

Begs a pictorial companion
Oh lord! What can one add to 170+ reviews?

The Ancestor's Tale does something rarely done, and that is taking on the natural history of all life. There are a few paleontology books which attempt the same (and are well worth looking into) but here we have the more theoretical approach, infusing our modern understanding of genetics to create something really compelling.

My primary reason for bothering with a review was to point out two things almost necessitated by this book: 1) A pictorial companion book (in full color) would do wonders. There are so many examples given that either handy access to google images or some pretty impressive prior knowledge of all forms of life is a must! How much more fun to have a coffee table companion work, or even a repressing of the book in said coffee table format with pictures of everything (or perhaps, a dvd?)

2) With such excellent series as the PBS 'Evolution' or BBC's 'Planet Earth', might Ancestor's Tale serve as the foundation for a new series on the same scale as Attenborough's 'Life on Earth' with all the modern evidence of evolution that it seems so much of the US public is ill-informed about? I don't know who would make it, or where the money would come from, but the US definitely needs it!

Dawkins' evolutionary tour de force walkthrough from humans to RNA worlds
The Ancestor's Tale may well be Dawkins most accomplished achievement on evolutionary biology although maybe not his most readable general science book. What he has done is to start with modern humans and to follow a phylogeny (the evolutionary tree) through geological time to the RNA world (precursors to DNA) covering the most important ancestors (called concestors) along with intermixed fascinating factual anecdotes. For all intents and purposes this is the evolution walkthrough that many have demanded but unlike his other works this is far more powered by scientific technical details and less witty than his challenges to supernatural magical thinking although he does try to break the mechanical procedure of his enormous endeavour with interludes of intriguing biological buzz stories.

There are not many biologists who would have undertaken such a task but there is a demand for it and as Dawkins so aptly puts it, this one is a real pilgrimage. He covers Cro-Magnon, humankind, Archaic homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Ergasts, Habilines, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orang utans, gibbons, old world monkeys, new world monkeys, howler monkeys, tarsiers, lemurs, bushbabies, aye-aye, the cretaceous catastrophe, colugos, tree shrews, rodents, rabbits, mice, beavers, laurasiatheres, hippos, seals, xenarhrans, armadillo's, afrotheres, marsupials, moles, monotremes, duckbills, star-nosed moles, duckbilled platypus, mammal-like reptiles, sauropsids, Galapagos finch, peacocks, dodos, elephant birds, amphibians, salamanders, narrowmouths, axolotls, lungfish, coelacanth, ray-finned fish, leafy sea dragons, pike, mudskipper, cichlid, blind cave fish, flounders, sharks, lampreys, hagfish, lancelets, sea squirts, ambulacrarians, protostomes, ragworms, brine shrimp, leaf cutters, grasshoppers, fruit fies, rotifers, brancacles, velvet worms, acoelomorph flatworms, cnidarians, jellyfish, polypifers, ctenophores, placezoans, spongers, choanoflagellates, drips, fungi, amoebozoans, plants, cauliflowers, redwoods, mixotrich, archaea, eubacteria, rhizobiums, taqs and the RNA world. Now he covers the evolution of each of these, not that these modern organisms are what we evolved from (a silly creationist idea propagated because they can't deal with the actual case for evolution). We share a common ancestor with each of them and this book is all about those rendezvous points.

The bulk of evolutionary data is truly overwhelming although quite often the science can get merciless for the uninitiated. For this reason The Ancestor's Tale is for the advanced Dawkins reader (or those with some experience with evolution literature; if not try his `The Blind Watchmaker' or `The Selfish Gene' first) and is surprisingly light on anti-creationism/anti-religion but is double weighty on science and in the end it's a torrent of challenges to fundamentalism busting through and through with non-stop facts upon facts (650+ pages of them) supporting evolution. Again Dawkins has created one of the most conscious raising experiences you can get from any book about this topic.

To top it off the book has no less than four color sections with dozens of plates and this doesn't even include the illustrations that adorn every other couple of pages or so. There are few paperbacks on the shelves that are remotely as well put together as this volume. The Ancestor's Tale is a stupendous tome that sets a benchmark in evolution writings. Prepare to put the work in (you may have to make several attempts at it over a long period of time) but in the end it is worth it. This is history in the making in more ways than one.

Delightful
This book is an extremely enjoyable and edifying read. Dawkins writes with wit, fluency, clarity and erudition; very readable, though people without much biology background might find it tough going at times. I can hear Dawkins' voice as I read; the writing has that flowing conversational style. I'm going to hate to see this one end. I wish there were a million more books like this one, and that I could live 10000 years, and spend every hour of every day reading them.