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The Ancestor's Tale | 
| Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Phoenix
Category: Book
List Price: £9.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 3155
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 626
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 2.1
ISBN: 0753819961
EAN: 9780753819968
ASIN: 0753819961
Publication Date: September 1, 2005
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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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
Imagine No Religion! September 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Having read 3 or 4 Dawkins books, I get the distinct impression that he majors on 2 subjects: atheism and evolutionary biology. The great virtue of this book is that Dawkins is waxing lyrical about something he loves rather than something he hates (bar the final chapter) and hence shows what a great scientist he really is.
Whether this was intentional or not is hard to fathom but I feel that his magnum opus is Biology and the beauty of the wording combined with the immense depth of his research remind you of the flipside to this book - the God Delusion.
Before I started this book I was skeptical as to evolution and didn't believe in Bio or Abiogenesis. Since I have read it, I have found the measured tone and skillful combating of creationism in this book have won me over and I'm am now a far bigger fan of his than I was b4.
Of course, there is the last chapter where the supernatural is derided as not adding to the beauty of evolution. But even this chapter is measured and subtle, rather than polemnical.
As the cliche goes: if you don't believe in evolution, read this [Dawkins] book. But further to this, if you think Dawkins is Satan's son and is not an excellent scientist, then this book should also be top of your reading list rather than the latest CS Lewis...
A Brief History of Life on Earth August 10, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
It may seem misleading to call a 688 page book "brief." Yet, given that "The Ancestor's Tale" covers a couple billion years of history of life on earth, 688 pages is not so long. More importantly, "The Ancestor's Tale" does not seem long when you read it. There is so much to tell, and Dawkins tells it so well. In addition to providing an overview of how all living things are related, Dawkins details numerous wondrous creatures that I certainly never knew existed. This book takes some time to read, but you won't be bored.
The title "The Ancestor's Tale" is a play on Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." The characters in Chaucer's books meet on the road to Canterbury. Similarly, Dawkins takes each living creature back on a pilgrimage back in time to find their ancestors. Of course, the "pilgrims" meet each other when they find their common ancestors. For example, we modern humans meet the chimpanzees when we both find our common ancestor. Despite the title, Dawkins does rely on the Chaucer metaphor much, which is just as well.
The Ancestor's Tale is, in a very real sense, the story of evolution, but it does not attempt to describe in detail how evolution works. Of course, in telling the story, Dawkins cannot help but provide and discuss much of the evidence of evolution. Dawkins discusses the mechanism of evolution more directly his earlier books, such as The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, both of which I highly recommend.
A Beguiling Trek Through The Taxonomy And History Of Life That's Led By Richard Dawkins August 9, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution" is a beguiling literary trek through the taxonomy and history of life on Planet Earth; one that's led with ample eloquence by eminent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. In this vast tome Dawkins has crafted what is indeed the popular scientific equivalent of Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales", taking us along a long journey back to the dawn of life itself, approximately 4 billion years ago, via a molecular phylogeny designed by his former undergraduate student Yan Wong. But it's a long, long trek that's quite unlikely to be viewed as tedious by the reader. Here, Dawkins is truly at his most expansive, using this taxonomy to discuss the compelling issues of contemporary evolutionary theory and history, in which he covers everything from genetics, speciation, convergent evolution and mass extinctions to microevolution, sexual selection, biogeography, and the relevance of plate tectonics to past and current biogeographic distributions of organisms. Relying on Wong's intricate molecular phylogeny, Dawkins takes us along to forty branching points - previous geological moments - in that phylogeny, where we meet the "concestor" - the last common ancestor - of all organisms at that very point. It is a quite compelling, often insightful, narrative that Dawkins admits does owe much to Chaucer's legendary "The Canterbury Tales".
Dawkins doesn't hesitate to interrupt the relentless ebb and flow of his narrative in a series of individual "tales", that are designed illustrate some unique trait of a given species, and then, by mere extension, serve as the jumping off point(s) for riveting discussions on some aspect(s) of modern evolutionary biology. A classic example is the section that he devotes to the sauropsids, which consists of lizard-like and dinosaur-like (archosaurs, including birds) reptiles in the chapter entitled "Rendezvous 16". In the first of these tales, "The Galapagos Finch's Tale", Dawkins recounts the decades-long fieldwork of ecologists Peter and Rosemary Grant who have been studying microevolution in the Galapagos Finches. He focuses upon the aftermath of a severe drought in 1977 that led inevitably to sharp declines in the populations of several species, observing that those individuals in the dominant species, Geospiza fortis, who were only 5 percent larger than their peers, were the ones who survived; a classic example of "a small episode of natural selection in action, during a single year." Within the same species, the Grants and their coworkers observed selection pressures resulting not only in larger body size, but also in larger beak size too. In the chapter's next tale, "The Peacock's Tale", Dawkins emphasizes the importance of sexual selection, arguing persuasively that it may have had a role in shaping the course of human evolution, perhaps via preferential selection of females for "smarter" males. That is followed, in turn, by "The Dodo's Tale", in which Dawkins discusses not only the Dodo's extinction, but also the tendency towards flightlessness in bird species inhabiting remote oceanic islands.
While Dawkins has crafted a most compelling narrative in this vast book, "The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution", is far from perfect, especially in its depiction of the fossil record. Much to my amazement, he doesn't discuss the existence of long-term stasis in the fossil record, predicted by the theory of punctuated equilibria, which has been substantiated by decades of extensive fieldwork by paleobiologists, ever since the publication of the classic 1972 paper coauthored by noted American paleobiologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould (This is a rather peculiar omission since Dawkins has been a staunch critic of punctuated equilibria.). Nor does he discuss, except only in passing, the diverse, radical differences in the compositions of marine faunas during, respectively, the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras, which have been noted for decades due to excellent fieldwork, and more recently, by excellent statistical modeling done by paleontologist Jack Sepkoski and his colleagues at the University of Chicago. And he also misses the important history of predator-prey interactions that form much of coevolution, which has been discussed admirably elsewehere by noted marine ecologist Geerat Vermeij. But, in retrospect, my criticisms of Dawkins' omissions are relatively minor, simply because he has accomplished successfully, the arduous task of making both the taxonomy and history of life a most beguiling tale. Without question, "The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution", should be regarded for a long time as one of the classics of popular evolutionary biology literature.
 A highly recommendable example of popular science July 28, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Essentially a history book, albiet one which long out-spans the barely significant spectrum of human history, Richard Dawkins explores our universal family tree, delving in to the past sufficiently deeply to expose what our ancestors must have looked and behaved like; from morphologically-recognisable hominoids, through to animals we would think entirely remote from ourselves, and at last to ancient, uni-cellular beings.
The welcome way in which Dawkins presents this ancestory is by way of a 'pilgrimage'; modern man moves backwards through time, along with every other living organism; and at special epochs in antiquity (from our perspective, at least) we and and another modern pilgrim 'rendezvous' where we share a common ancestor, and at each rendezvous point, the modern pilgrim(s) relates his 'tale', which is usually an essay (of sorts) on some area of evolution, by the author - Dawkins doesn't have the pilgrims themselves telling the stories. It's a quirky and lucid way of presenting the history of life on Earth.
After this lenghty treatment of Evolutionary Biology, Dawkins's recognition as an author capable of writing accessible science is surely intact; my own level of Biological education is still at secondary school level (AS-Level), and I found the majority of the book perfectly comprehendible; he is an emminently articulate writer who makes fairly complex subjects understandable for lay-persons.
Having said that, there are areas of the book which are really rather challenging, and strain the limits of what is classifiable as 'popular' science; I still haven't plucked up the courage to tackle the Gibbon's Tale, and there are similar examples strewn across the 630 pages of this tome; at best Dawkins can be an inspiring, up-lifting and thoroughly entertaining writer who's enthusiasm shimmers in his lovely prose; at worst, the complex nature of some of his Tale's can render his writing rather frustrating and incomprehensible; but, ultimately, the cause of this (as far as I can gather) is deficiency on the part of the reader (incidently, it seems that the most difficult parts of the text are invaribly those co-written by Dawkins' assistent, Yan Wong).
Some reviewers elsewhere have said that this book has been overly politicised by Dawkins; I don't see much reason to support this; there is one tale, The Grasshopper's Tale which is almost exclusively political (it deals with the 'vexed and sensitive topic of race'), but aside from this, political outbursts occur rather infrequently, and I rather think they colour the book positively, even though I don't always agree with Dawkins.
It would be a tall order for a 630-page nonfiction book to consistently sustain the reader's interest, and The Ancestor's Tale doesn't quite succeed; there are areas which feel quite flabby and impoverished of real, memorable import, lenghty descriptions of various animals, and discussions about specifics such as animal classification, whilst necessary, are mind-numbingly boring.
Having read the shorter and far less challenging 'The Selfish Gene', I must conclude that his 1976 publication was a more entertaining read, and, really, a better book; however, The Ancestor's Tale is an immensely readable and commendable work, and has some of the greatest passages of popular science I've read, The Beaver's Tale is a superb example, and one of many. Occasionaly difficult, ultimately rewarding and deeply affecting, The Ancestor's Tale, is a worth while read.
Dawkins' best! April 9, 2008
For the layman, this is perhaps Dawkins' best piece of work.
His readable style is unhindered by complicated genetics, leaving the reader to be hurled through time on a journey towards every living things' common ancestor.
Interweaving engrossing examples of the animal kingdom and fantastic research from around science, Dawkins works the threads of the extant world into an breathtaking tapestry.
Recommended to anyone.
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