The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins

The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution is a history, in a way, of the expression of evolution. Told from the point of view of humans (who else?), it moves backward in evolutionary history visiting the major junction points where our species’ ancestors branched off from other groups. As the book progresses, the leaps (in form and function, as well as time) get progressively greater, ending with the origins of the first forms of life on Earth, estimated to be almost 4 billion years ago. The shtick of the book is that at each of these “rendezvous” between groups, a particular organism at that junction tells a “tale” which illustrates some principle of evolution.

I know a fair amount about hominid and primate evolution and pretty much nothing “before” that, so I found the later chapters more captivating than the first. It turns out I often didn’t know what our ancestors were.

I appreciated that Dawkins doesn’t shy away from the complexities in evolutionary history, but I wish the book’s structure were different. He reminds the reader repeatedly that the notion of progress as applied to evolution is pure nonsense — it’s nothing more than an expression of observer bias. To us, the notion of moving from sea to land, from four legs to two, seems obvious and natural. In reality, evolution moves in no particular direction at all, and even in our own history there are regressions and backtracking and the repeated “re-invention” of features.

Think about the evolutionary perspective of a bird. To them, mammals are an evolutionary dead-end: a minimally notable subplot in an unbroken chain from sea to land to air, from proto-reptile to dinosaur to bird. Humans managed to achieve flight only by over-engineering some unrelated organ (the brain) and constructing devices that surpass bird flight only in altitude and speed, but not even remotely in grace, agility or endurance. One imagines the pinnacle of evolution, from the point of view of a swift, of almost never having to set foot on land in an entire lifetime.

There are weirder trees to imagine: what would a fish think of the evolution of a whale? (”What a pointless digression were lungs and legs”, probably.) And the eusocial insects would be amazed that primitive forms of relatedness were still hanging around.

Dawkins can’t help but grumble about creationists throughout, but it’s mostly constructive: he cites the number of times the eye has independently evolved (nine) and there’s a good amount of space devoted to homeobox genes and their role in macroevolution. But I got the impression that he was holding back, if only because he knew he had The God Delusion in the pipeline.

Overall, it’s a good book, especially for people who enjoyed biology in school but haven’t kept up with the extraordinary discoveries enabled by molecular DNA analysis (dogs and the most recent common human ancestor are both from Asia, who knew?) Next up: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Dawkins buddy Sam Harris.