The Ancestor's Tale

The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong

I am sure that most readers have heard about Richard Dawkins, but probably in relation to his book The God Delusion (2006). What they may not realise is that he is an evolutionary biologist and an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. 

I was in Dymocks in the Melbourne CBD some months ago (mid 2019) and browsing the science section when I came across the second edition of his book The Ancestor's Tale (2016). The original edition had been published in 2004 and this second edition brought it up to date for the subsequent 12 years of investigation. Co-written with his former research assistant Yan Wong, it follows the path of humans backwards through evolutionary history, meeting humanity's cousins as they converge on common ancestors. Here's the blurb

The renowned biologist and thinker Richard Dawkins presents his most expansive work yet: a comprehensive look at evolution, ranging from the latest developments in the field to his own provocative views. Loosely based on the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dawkins's Tale takes us modern humans back through four billion years of life on our planet. As the pilgrimage progresses, we join with other organisms at the forty "rendezvous points" where we find a common ancestor. The band of pilgrims swells into a vast crowd as we join first with other primates, then with other mammals, and so on back to the first primordial organism.

Dawkins's brilliant, inventive approach allows us to view the connections between ourselves and all other life in a bracingly novel way. It also lets him shed bright new light on the most compelling aspects of evolutionary history and theory: sexual selection, speciation, convergent evolution, extinction, genetics, plate tectonics, geographical dispersal, and more. The Ancestor's Tale is at once a far-reaching survey of the latest, best thinking on biology and a fascinating history of life on Earth. Here Dawkins shows us how remarkable we are, how astonishing our history, and how intimate our relationship with the rest of the living world.

It took me a long time to read the book which comes in at a whopping 770 pages (around 700 of text). It was not that it was uninteresting - the opposite was the case, but its a long technical read and takes time. 

Once you have wound your way through the various rendezvous points right back to the first single cell organism 4 billion years ago, Dawkins has comprehensively built up the argument that we're all one family, linked through the genes we share, which we've inherited from our common ancestors. It's a truly incredible thought - that all life on the earth has evolved from a common start point. As one of the Goodreads reviwers explained

That means that when you go outside and lie down in the garden, everything you can see and hear – people walking nearby, their pet dogs, the squirrel darting past, the birds you can hear tweeting, the insects and tiny bugs crawling around underneath you, the trees the birds are standing on, the grass you're lying on, the bacteria in your guts – all of them are your cousins: you're quite literally related to them in the real, genealogical sense.

Definitely one to read.