The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Paperback)

Like most people I enjoy reading books that support my world view, even more so now that I am getting old and the brain cells are getting locked in. The Ancestor's Tale is one of these books.

Richard Dawkins already has a reputation as one of the most influential thinkers about evolution since Darwin and in this book he has written a history of the evolution of life told backwards. To do this he adopts the literary device used by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales. In this case all the living creatures of the present, independently of each other, begin a pilgrimage back through time to find their ancestors. Dawkins is the representative of humans and their science, and as he travels on his own journey he starts to meet other life forms. The journey moves backward through hundreds of millions of years and making stops at "Rendezvous" points in time at which the various life forms join him in discovering a common ancestor. At each rendezvous Dawkins stops and rationalizes through use of modern scientific discoveries, analysis, and analogy, to tell stories of why the different life forms he meets are joining the pilgrimage at that particular point and relates fascinating "tales" about their lives.

One is continually amazed at the diligence and perseverance of the scientists who study living things to figure out the tales they have to tell. The story of how the Sacculina barnacle parasitizes crabs or how the African horsefly survives in dried up mud are astounding "tales", and the scientists who figured out the extraordinary and complicated story of Mixotricha paradoxa, a protozoan that lives in the gut of termites, certainly have different genes than the rest of us.

Some of his explanations are a struggle to get through, and his scientific political correctness in the frequent use of scientific taxonomic names when common ones would do, certainly slow things down for the average reader. Often he goes off on digressions to make some personal political point. He certainly is not impressed with President G. W. Bush and has a low opinion of fundamentalist Christian ideas of creation. He also occasionally gets "emotionally high jacked" from his scientific objectivism as when he calls the ideas of a scientific opponent "bonkers", or the ideas of Prince Charles "dotty'. He thinks the idea that there is "a mystical balance of nature" is the type of thing that appeals "to the same kind of airheads who go to quack doctors to balance their energy fields." These emotional lapses do however make him human like the rest of us, and are easily forgiven.

As he travels back in time the less definite the rendezvous points become, until at the final rendezvous the actual time is totally uncertain and relationships among living things are really just speculation. He makes it obvious that man is not an end or goal of evolution and that the idea of higher or lower life forms are really only value judgments of the human animal because of the "conceit of hindsight". However, it appears, like most scientists, Dawkins assumes that all this knowledge that we are accumulating will lead to some sort of epiphany for the human animal. I personally don't think it will, but it is great fun taking the journey with him anyway.