The Ancestor’s Tale is structured around the conceit of a pilgrimage backwards in time from modern Homo sapiens to the beginning of life on earth. Along the way, the human pilgrims are joined by other species: first, close cousins of humans like apes, monkeys, and rodents, and progressing steadily to more distant relations like birds, fish, echinoderms, arthropods, fungi, plants, and bacteria. At each “rendezvous,” Dawkins selects a few of the joining species to tell “tales,” which are illustrative, in some cases, of general principles of evolution, and in others, of the sheer weirdness of some forms of life on earth.

This can make the process of reading The Ancestor’s Tale a bit haphazard, which is admittedly odd, since the conceit of a backwards pilgrimage seems like it would impose a tight structure on the information presented. Instead, The Ancestor’s Tale is effectively a miscellany of biological expositions on subjects as diverse as color vision, neoteny, encephalization, sexual selection, electrolocation, radiometric dating, countershading, symbiosis, ring species, and Hox genes, and those are just the highlights I remember without flipping through the index. The topics don’t really build on one another in the order they’re presented; rather, they’re presented as it becomes convenient, based on which species are joining the pilgrimage at which rendezvous.

That said, it was still a pleasure to read, and there was a lot to learn. If you’re familiar with Linnaean taxonomy—kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species—but have always wondered about the interstices of that apparently rigid structure (e.g., how much more closely are humans related to rats than to elephants?), you’ll probably enjoy The Ancestor’s Tale. Likewise, you’ll get a kick out of it if you like nugget-sized factoids to astound your friends. While reading it, I frequently exploded to my fiancée with pronouncements about, for instance, the relative size of testicles in chimpanzees versus gorillas. She didn’t like that, but you might.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that, in some respects, The Ancestor’s Tale resembles a backwards retelling of Dawkins’ first popular science book, The Selfish Gene. The last chapter of The Ancestor’s Tale is a fascinating update of the first chapters of The Selfish Gene, on the chemical origins of biological self-replication. As a science book I’d still recommend The Selfish Gene more highly, but if you want to know briefly how the science of the origins of life on earth has progressed in the past thirty-odd years, The Ancestor’s Tale is a good place to start.

This was an enthralling tour through issues in modern paleo-molecular evolutionary biology. The sometimes complex issues were generally well explained considering that I am a novice in the field. I could hardly put it down. ( )

Because it covers so many topics, many are treated very quickly (there are a handful of two-page chapters--and this is a 600+ page book). That makes it hard going. But the writing is excellent, and the plethora of fascinating and exotic organisms and difficult but intriguing ideas makes every second worth it.

It's like a trip down a river: you start on a narrow stream in a village high in the catchment and go through your community first (human evolution). By the end you are in a river several kilometres wide and the influx of major tributaries (fungi, plants) is barely noticed. It is perhaps not surprising that the best parts are the start, on the great apes, and the end, on the origin of life and Dawkins' ideas about watersheds in evolutionary "progress".

Perhaps more than any other book, this was the one that enabled me, as a lay person with broad interest in various fields of science, to "get" the essence of evolutionary biology.

I wonder if, for me, there was something about the forward timeline and clear, discretely drawn branching of family trees of traditional teaching methods of evolutionary theory that made me want to see speciation as some sort of magical, point-in-time, event.

In contrast, by working from humanity backwards in time by relating to one's recent generations' genealogy, I was better able to conceive bushiness of the evolutionary tree as well as its more general flowing nature, being discrete only genetically, only in the changes between one generation and the next.

Yes, Dawkins can't help but sceech a little with his philosophy of religion and politics, but a wonderfully presented, human-oriented, innovative and engaging explanation of evolutionary biology. ( )

Fascinating Read: A terrific documentation of the current state of scientific discovery and understanding of evolution, particularly relating to genes. I was imparted with a greater comprehension of the workings of the "tree of life" - where it comes from and where it might go. Dawkins has a comfortable conversational writing style that is enjoyable to follow and digest.