The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life

An excellent, rather mathematical, doorstop of a book. So far, I have read only through "Rendezvous 0: The Tasmanian's Tale". This goes into detail about how estimates can be made of the time when the first shared ancestor of all living humans lived (Dawkins calls this Chang 1) and the time when all animals can be subdivided into two classes, those who are the ancestors of all living humans, and those who are the ancestors of no living humans (Chang 2). I've previously read Dawkins's "The Greatest Show on Earth", but that is a lighter, less mathematical book, and his discussion of the same topic in that book just ended up confusing me. He points out that the simplest mathematical model, which has assumptions of a completely stable show more population and random mating would put the earliest human "Concestor" as having lived around 500 AD, which is clearly wrong. This helpfully demonstrates why a mathematical model may not predict reality too well, with its additional complexity. He throws in the helpful idea that Concestor 0 must have lived before the most distant time when a human population became isolated and gives an estimate of a lower bound of tens of thousands of years and an upper bound of hundred's of thousands. Likely this concestor, who must be an ancestor of isolated populations like those in Tasmania did not live in Africa. He points out that quite a large number of humanity's Chang 2 ancestors have not bequeathed their genes to the current human population.

At only 8 hours, for a 600 page book, the audio edition that I'm listening to is abridged, with whole chapters dropped. I wish the cover had made this clear. show less

Imagine traveling back in time to observe the last shared ancestor of humans, bonobos and chimpanzees. What might that individual have looked like? What was its lifestyle? And what if we ventured further back, to when those three species shared an ancestor with gorillas? How long would it take before we met up with the ancestors of all mammals, birds, lizards, sharks or insects? This book is a reverse journey of human ancestry, each stop a convergence with an extant group in the tree of life.

There's nothing I love more than a thick, detailed book of natural history, and I quite enjoyed it. I have to admit that sometime during the final quarter my eyes started to glaze over when the subject matter turned heavily to cell biology and show more genetics -- no fault of the author, it's not my wheelhouse. Recommended heartily to natural history buffs. show less

It’s something I’d wondered myself in the past: not how we see colours, not the biological technicalities of colour vision, but what they’re for, why we see in colour at all. And after reading one particular essay in this extraordinary book, then mulling it over while out being taken for a walk by my dog, I suddenly saw the answer to that. It wasn’t exactly what the essay was about; that was more to do with the ways in which very different animals sense the world around them (the star-nosed mole, the bat, the platypus, or us humans) but I got even more out of it than the author had put in. It had already crossed my mind years before that, with her almost unbelievably sensitive nose, I’m betting my dog doesn’t just smell the show more world in colour, but in full on, in-your-face, technicolour—and now, if that’s so, I also understood why. And all that from a single short essay among dozens, a three-page sliver tucked away among a humongous seven hundred.
   The book itself isn’t easy to characterise in a short review. It’s patterned after Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and just as that was a series of reflections on life, so is this; but while, for Chaucer, that meant human life, in The Ancestor’s Tale it’s all of life on Earth, everything else that lives here too. The “stories” are actually essays about the whole business of being a tiny living part of this planet.
   Perhaps some will be put off by the author’s name, which would be a pity. Dawkins is used as a human punch-bag by an impressive variety of people, on which to vent their own shortcomings, frustrations and bile; but you get a truer picture here: more likeable than the rabble would have you believe, as clear-headed and meticulous a guide as you could ask for to lead an odyssey across several billion years—and even has a sense of humour (although the publishers should have handed out free gas-masks ahead of the paddlefish-up-a-creek joke!).
   An exceptional book. show less

I think this is Dawkin’s best book so far (I haven’t read The Greatest Show on Earth yet). I probably don’t need to explain too much about Dawkin’s writing style; his atheist polemics are somewhat tempered here – because what he’s talking about is so interesting that he doesn’t have time to jump all over the religious.


The basic theme of the book is a tracing evolution backward, in a series of “rendezvous”. At each rendezvous, another group of living things “joins” (and the phyletic level of the joining group gets broader and broader); chimpanzees, rodents, monotremes, sauropsids, lungfish, ctenophores, all the way back to eubacteria. This is the reverse of the normal evolutionary explanatory method, in which show more groups “split” as you go forward in time rather than “joining” as you go backward. It works quite well, because it emphasizes similarities rather than differences. There are little natural-history anecdotes at each “join”, which illustrate some aspect of the joining group’s biology; as a collection of essays, the book would be worth it for these alone.


Of personal importance to me is I’ve finally been dragged kicking and screaming out of my final death grip on phyletic systematics. I grew up with – Mom read it to me before I could read myself – The Golden Treasury of Natural History, which was a profusely illustrated children’s book covering everything from the origin of the solar system to modern biology – modern for 1953. There was a double page multi-colored spread of the Great Tree of Life, with things neatly divided into Mammals and Birds and Reptiles and Amphibians and Fish and so forth for the invertebrates. And in Mammals things like Odd-Toes Ungulates and Armadillos and so forth. All that’s gone now – “Fish”, in particular, has been known to be polyphyletic for years (in cladistics terms, a cow is more closely related to a coelacanth than a shark is; back then they were all “Fish”. Well, not the cow).


That means Dawkins springs a bunch of new groupings – Laurasiatheria and Sauropsidia, for example, and Ambulacraria - that I have to puzzle over. Everything I learned as a budding taxonomist is wrong. It’s wonderful. show less

There are some facts the simple knowing of which seems to me to be a supreme achievement of our species. The fact that we are all made of stardust. The fact that 99.9999999999999 percent of all matter is empty. The fact that mass and energy can be expressed in terms of each other. Stuff like that.

Pre-eminent among these to me, for sheer mind-expanding awe, is the fact that life on this planet has developed precisely once, as far as we know, and everything on earth has evolved from it. 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, show more 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.

If you go far enough back in time, in other words, you will eventually find a creature whose descendants evolved into both squirrels (say) and people. Indeed, the rules of heredity being what they are, you could even find a single individual who was a common ancestor to every squirrel and human alive. And indeed such an animal really did exist, around 75 million years ago in the Upper Cretaceous. It probably looked sort of mousey, and Dawkins estimates that he or she was our ‘15-million-greats-grandparent’. Squirrels are not ‘closer’ to this creature than humans are: we and they are equally related, having been evolving independently for the same amount of time.

The Ancestor's Tale takes exactly this approach to exploring evolution. It starts with humans and works backwards – looking first at the common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees, and continuing until we reach the common ancestor of all life on earth. Dawkins's word for a common ancestor of more than one species is ‘concestor’, and there are only about 40 of them (!) between us and the origin of life more than three billion years ago. The Cretaceous mammal I mentioned above, which evolved into us and squirrels (along with all the other rodents, lagomorphs and primates), is Concestor 10 according to this schema.

I think there's a lot of traps you can fall into when you start thinking about evolution. It's easy to feel, instinctively, that evolution is somehow teleological: that it's been working towards – if not us, then at least creatures that are increasingly complex and increasingly intelligent. But that of course is not the case. Things survive that reproduce themselves well, and there are plenty of single-celled organisms still with us that have seen no need to get any more complicated for millions of years. Bacterial life is in fact astonishingly varied and rich, whole phyla of creatures that branched off before multicellular life even came about; indeed, chemically speaking,

we are more similar to some bacteria than some bacteria are to other bacteria.

Just think about that for a second.

Before Dawkins got distracted by religious idiocy, he was well known as being one of the scientists most able to explain complicated ideas in a fresh and accessible way. All his skills are on display in this work. It's not just the zoology and the evolutionary biology, where you'd expect him to be strong; there's also a fantastically lucid explanation of the biochemistry within a cell, and even one of the best explanations of the physics of radioactivity that I've come across. He is calm and careful; he repeats himself where necessary; he shares several teacherly witticisms; and he does all this without ever condescending to the reader. He allows paragraphs of complex material to sit, so that you can read and re-read them a few times before he carries on. Occasionally he cannot stop himself breaking out in exclamations of wonder or poetic meditation – as when he discusses the fossilised footprints of three early hominids from some three-and-a-half million years ago:

Who does not wonder what these individuals were to each other, whether they held hands or even talked, and what forgotten errand they shared in a Pliocene dawn?

His enthusiasm is infectious. The whole book is a fantastic exploration of this most beautiful piece of modern human understanding. It's full of astonishing anecdotes and scientific details about the natural world, but it also all ties together into a conception of life that's more awe-inspiring and more moving than any supernatural system could ever be. show less

Finally!!

I think I spent more time with this book than any other in recent years...a solid six weeks. That's not to say it was boring or hard to get through, quite the opposite. I enjoyed slowly savoring the massive amount of information up for offer in this tome. Richard Dawkins' is a prolific author, and it took me a while to decide which of his books to read first. This one has been sitting on my shelf for about a year, and I finally picked it up to read concurrently with a Genetics and Evolution class that I am taking via Coursera. It was a splendid idea.

Dawkins tends to go on and on about the craziness of religion, but thankfully that was mostly absent in this book. I like to focus on the topic at hand, without the jests and jeers show more at those with a different view. And the topic at hand in The Ancestor's Tale is an over-arching tale of evolution on this planet, going backwards in time (from a human perspective), all the way back to the origin of life. More than anything, Dawkin's vast knowledge of zoology shines, and I learned more than I ever thought I could in one month about the variety of life on this planet, and how they have evolved to be so darn interesting. His modeling of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales lends itself very well to the subject, and was a great method of (non-fiction) storytelling.

As it was written ten years previously, one thought must accompany the reader. Evolutionary biology, genetics, molecular studies....these fields are constantly changing, with on-going innovations and new developments. Therefore, you must read a book like this with an eye to the present, and new research. For example, since Ancestor's Tale was published, a complete Neandertal genome was sequenced, and a few of Dawkins' statements are somewhat out-dated and not supported by recent findings. The same holds true for the molecular clock, and calculating the rendezvous points with various ancestors. I would love to see an updated edition of The Ancestor's Tale published at some point. show less

The Ancestor's Tale is Richard Dawkins attempt to explain life and evolution. He begins with Homo sapiens and works his way back in history. The story is in the form of a pilgrimage to the dawn of life and along the way we meet many other pilgrims as they find their way to the same common ancestor (Concestor in Dawkins vocabulary) while on their own pilgrimage. Sometimes a bit rambling, often humorous, and always interesting enough to keep me wanting to read more, he fills over six hundred pages full of facts, interesting asides, theories, and his own opinions. There is also a substantial contribution by Yan Wong. While I'm sure there have been advances in some of the areas discussed since the publication of The Ancestor's Tale it would show more still be a good place to start for an overview of biology and evolution. show less