The Ancestor's Tale

The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins

Category: Science Grade: B+

Well, we have a first. Occasionally, Dan will recommend a book to me and I've learned over the years that he likes to read on a different intellectual plane than the rest of us. I've tried reading Salman Rushdie and Anthony Burgess and just couldn't get going. I guess they fly right over my head. But finally...

Writing a good book about science for a lay audience is really tough. Most scientists (or engineers or musicians or just about anybody), have their own jargon. Stripping out the jargon so us normal people don't get lost without stripping out the content at the same time is a task that most science writers just aren't up to. Most science books I've tried to read go to one of two extremes - they either read like children's books or they read like textbooks. Neither approach is likely to hold somebody's interest.

Dawkins has really accomplished something in this book. He's managed to explain evolution in an interesting and engaging way that keeps you reading for some 600+ pages. He's used two gimmicks to frame the science that are, in large part, responsible for keeping things approachable. First, he tells the story of evolution backwards. That is, he starts with humans and works backward through time chronicling each different group of living things from which our evolutionary path sprang. He speculates about what he calls our concestors - a creature that is, possibly, a common ancestor of us and the newly joined branch. It takes a little getting used to the fact that time is moving backwards but, given the way evolution works, each step is relatively small (in the grand scheme).

The second gimmick is to use Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a model for his story telling. At each branch point, Dawkins picks one of the creatures from the new branch and uses that creature to give us a relevant and almost always interesting lesson.

First thing I have to say about this book -- if you can read this and come away without a firm conviction that evolution is the way things happened, you're just not paying attention. Although its called the "theory" of evolution, there's so much documented evidence, so many interesting experiments, that its just inconceivable that evolution isn't a good model of how the earth turned in to the environment that we know. With the time frames we're thinking about here - hundreds of millions of years - of course, we'll never have unchallengeable proof of the theory, but its so elegant and fits what we do know so perfectly that, while there may be more and more details that we discover with better research tools, the framework of evolution is the way things happened.

Think about simple things - front, back, up, down, left and right. Most animals that we're familiar with have a front and a back. Since most animals move to find food, its logical that animals who had their food intake portal (call it a mouth) in the "front", would be more likely to survive to adulthood and breed. Once that happens, animals who's waste removal portal is the farthest from their mouths - i.e. where it won't contaminate their food supply - are, again, more likely to breed. Similarly, if you think about most environments, up is very different from down. Attacks from predators are more likely to come from "up" as is light. "Down" is usually somewhat more protected and somewhat darker. So, creatures with protection like a shell or spikes, on the "top" will breed. If you think about most fish, they tend to be darker on the top than the bottom. This would seem to be because, given that light comes from "up", this kind of shading provides better camouflage. It just makes sense if you've got millions of years to breed for the most effective bodies. Oh, and left and right? For almost all animals, left and right don't pose different threats or advantages so most animals are side-to-side symetrical!

This isn't an easy book to read. Even though Dawkins has definitely made it approachable, there's a lot of long, Latin names to get through and even a fair amount of math in some sections. If you like science, though, this is a terrific broad brush view of evolution with a lot of biology, biochemistry and even some physics thrown in.

One final note - if you're a creationist and are easily offended, skip this book. Dawkins is convincing enough that he'll make you feel silly and, on occasion, he does rub it in a little. But, I have to say, if you're a creationist because of a belief in a God who created all this - wouldn't you really rather believe in a God that could design an incredible system like evolution than a God that could make a platypus?