The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins
The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life by Richard Dawkins, Weidenfeld Nicolson Illustrated, September 2, 2004, ISBN:0297825038
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In The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins synthesises his comprehensive vision of life. This Chaucerian collection of 40 tales takes us on a pilgrimage to meet our ancestors, eventually reaching back to the original molecules of life itself.
The Ancestor's Tale involves a motley bunch of "pilgrims" who explain their life to us, and illuminate our own, as we walk back through the past aeons. Chimpanzees join us at about 6 million years ago, gorillas at 7 million years, orang-utans at 14 million. Going even earlier, the Grasshopper falls in step and tells us about the problem of race, the Galapagos Finch tells us about the perils and excitement of rapid evolution on disparate islands, the Elephant Bird tells us about the drifting of the continents, the Rotifer's Tale is about sex...
Together the Ancestor's tales, so ably told by Richard Dawkins, give a deep understanding of the processes that have shaped life on Earth: convergent evolution, the isolation of populations, continental drift, the great extinctions. The tales are interspersed with prologues detailing the journey, route maps showing joining lineages, and life-like reconstructions of our common ancestors. The Ancestor's Tale represents a pilgrimage on an unimaginable scale: our goal is four billion years away, and the number of pilgrims joining us grows vast - ultimately encompassing all living creatures. At the end of the journey lies something remarkable...
Richard Dawkins is a renowned evolutionary biologist. At Oxford, he gained his doctorate under the Nobel-prize winning ethologist Niko Tinbergen. Since 1995 he has been Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. The Ancestor's Tale is the latest popular science book from one of the UK's leading science writers.
- Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale combines the illustrations and "glossiness" of a "coffee table" book, the erudition of a top scientist, and the style of one of our best science writers to tell, perhaps, the most important tale of all.