From Amazon.co.uk
Just as we trace our personal family trees from parents to grandparents and so on back in time, so in The Ancestor's Tale Richard Dawkins traces the ancestry of life. As he is at pains to point out, this is very much our human tale, our ancestry. Surprisingly, it is one that many otherwise literate people are largely unaware of. Hopefully Dawkins's name and well deserved reputation as a best selling writer will introduce them to this wonderful saga.

The Ancestor's Tale takes us from our immediate human ancestors back through what he calls ‘concestors,’ those shared with the apes, monkeys and other mammals and other vertebrates and beyond to the dim and distant microbial beginnings of life some 4 billion years ago. It is a remarkable story which is still very much in the process of being uncovered. And, of course from a scientist of Dawkins stature and reputation we get an insider's knowledge of the most up-to-date science and many of those involved in the research. And, as we have come to expect of Dawkins, it is told with a passionate commitment to scientific veracity and a nose for a good story. Dawkins's knowledge of the vast and wonderful sweep of life's diversity is admirable. Not only does it encompass the most interesting living representatives of so many groups of organisms but also the important and informative fossil ones, many of which have only been found in recent years.

Dawkins sees his journey with its reverse chronology as ‘cast in the form of an epic pilgrimage from the present to the past [and] all roads lead to the origin of life.’ It is, to my mind, a sensible and perfectly acceptable approach although some might complain about going against the grain of evolution. The great benefit for the general reader is that it begins with the more familiar present and the animals nearest and dearest to us—our immediate human ancestors. And then it delves back into the more remote and less familiar past with its droves of lesser known and extinct fossil forms. The whole pilgrimage is divided into 40 tales, each based around a group of organisms and discusses their role in the overall story. Genetic, morphological and fossil evidence is all taken into account and illustrated with a wealth of photos and drawings of living and fossils forms, evolutionary and distributional charts and maps through time, providing a visual compliment and complement to the text. The design also allows Dawkins to make numerous running comments and characteristic asides. There are also numerous references and a good index.-- Douglas Palmer


From Publishers Weekly
The diversity of the earth's plant and animal life is amazing—especially when one considers the near certainty that all living things can trace their lineage back to a single ancestor—a bacterium—that lived more than three billion years ago. Taking his cue from Chaucer, noted Oxford biologist Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, etc.) works his way narratively backward through time. As the path reaches points where humanity's ancestors converge with those of other species—primates, mammals, amphibians and so on—various creatures have tales that carry an evolutionary lesson. The peacock, for example, offers a familiar opportunity to discuss sexual selection, which is soon freshly applied to the question of why humans started walking upright. These passages maintain an erudite yet conversational voice whether discussing the genetic similarities between hippos and whales (a fact "so shocking that I am still reluctant to believe it") or the existence of prehistoric rhino-sized rodents. The book's accessibility is crucial to its success, helping to convince readers that, given a time span of millions of years, unlikely events, like animals passing from one continent to another, become practically inevitable. This clever approach to our extended family tree should prove a natural hit with science readers. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Scientific American
In this expansive book, Dawkins, the well-known evolutionary biologist and author (The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, A Devil's Chaplain, among others), gives us an eloquent treatise on evolution, ne-glecting neither the latest developments nor his own provocative views. As the title suggests, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales provides the model for the book's conceit--a pilgrimage back through four billion years of life on earth. We join with other organisms at rendezvous points where we find common ancestors, until we arrive at the "grand ancestor of all surviving life." As Dawkins explains: "Backward chronology in search of ancestors really can sensibly aim towards a single distant target ... and we can't help converging upon it no matter where we start--elephant or eagle, swift or salmonella, wellingtonia or woman.... Instead of treating evolution as aimed toward us, we choose modern Homo sapiens as our arbitrary, but forgivably preferred, starting point for a reverse chronology.... Following Chaucer's lead, my pilgrims, which are all the different species of living creatures, will have the opportunity to tell tales along the way to their Canterbury, which is the origin of life. It is these tales that form the main substance of this book."

Editors of Scientific American (202)


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
It's easy to imagine that the entire history of the universe is a kind of buildup to the appearance of Homo sapiens -- that the whole thing, somehow, is about us. Most writers on the subject of evolution (and I include a heartfelt mea culpa here) simply make a ritual genuflection to point out that the life history of humans is of no more fundamental importance than that of butterflies or Furbish's lousewort and then go on to talk only about humans. After all, it's humans who will be reading our books. Richard Dawkins of Oxford University is a well known figure in evolutionary theory. His book The Selfish Gene set the tone for a decade of debate about the inclusion of the new science of genetics into our view of the past history of life -- an inclusion that is now a routine part of the field. In this book, he undertakes a sweeping overview of that history, but an overview emphasizing that the life story of every species is equally interesting. Modeling his book self-consciously after Canterbury Tales, he imagines all species on Earth simultaneously beginning a journey backward in time, each following its own lifeline in a kind of pilgrimage to origins. As each species travels backward, it encounters others at points that Dawkins calls "rendezvous." At a rendezvous, we find the last common ancestor of the two species that are meeting. For example, by Dawkins's reckoning, human beings make their first real rendezvous between 5 and 7 million years in the past, with a primate whose lines of descent include us and the chimpanzees. At each rendezvous, there is a discussion of the fellow pilgrims we meet, then a "Tale," à la Chaucer. Thus, for example, as we trace human ancestry back, we have the Chimpanzee's Tale, the Beaver's Tale, as well as the Cauliflower's Tale (my personal favorite) and so on, right back to what he calls Taq's Tale, the story of an obscure bacterium (Thermus acquaticus) and a discussion of the origin of life itself. Each "Tale" goes into as much detail as is necessary to elucidate the scientific point illustrated by the rendezvous. The Cauliflower's Tale, for example, deals with the relation between rate of metabolism and body size, which seems to follow a regular trend for organisms from bacteria to whales. This is great stuff -- intriguingly written, honest about the controversies that exist, clear about the science. Dawkins does not dodge complexity where it is called for but keeps it to a minimum and winds up giving us as full and clear a picture of the way life developed on our planet as you are likely to find anywhere. In the end, I had only two general problems with this book, one technical, one stylistic. Dawkins is clearly what I have come to think of as a "gene guy" -- someone who wants to look at life from the perspective of DNA. Because of this, my sense is that he underplays the importance of fossils in his discussions. He claims, for example, that we could reconstruct the history of life just from living DNA, without any fossils at all. I am very skeptical of this claim, although this is a subject on which reasonable people can (and do) differ. It is never explicitly stated, but the book has a tone of genetic determinism, the notion that if you know an organism's DNA, you know everything important about that organism. There is virtually no mention of the importance of what are called epigenetic effects -- effects outside DNA that influence how an organism functions. I fear that coming to an understanding of how living things work isn't going to be as simple as sequencing a genome. The stylistic problem involves Dawkins's disconcerting habit of occasionally dropping in snide asides designed to demonstrate, I suppose, his impeccable politically correct sentiments. For example, in talking about the development of agriculture in the Middle East 10,000 years ago, he takes a swipe at the American Army for not preventing the looting of the Baghdad museum. (He conveniently ignores the fact that most of what was missing wasn't looted but removed for safekeeping, and what looting took place was almost certainly done by museum employees, possibly before the war even started.) At first these little asides were merely irritating, but after a while they got really annoying -- kind of like being trapped at a cocktail party by the most pompous, supercilious member of the English department. Dawkins is certainly entitled to hold and express his views, but they seem jarringly out of place in this book. He is far too good a writer, and too important a figure in the battle against scientific illiteracy, to allow these kinds of sophomoric self-indulgences to detract from a splendid piece of writing. Reviewed by James Trefil Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Plato plays the intellectual villain in this latest work of popular science by one of our most visible biologists. Dawkins indicts the ancient Greek thinker for advancing a doctrine of Ideal Types that has long obscured the linkages making all species one connected continuum. To remedy the effects of Plato's sin, Dawkins sets out on a pilgrimage tracing the history of the human species back to the very origins of life, marking along the way 39 rendezvous points where the human genealogical path crosses that of other terrestrial species. From kindred chimpanzees to humanity's hidden ties with eubacteria--and beyond into the very beginnings of heredity-- Dawkins charts an impressive body of biological theory and research, sometimes speculatively but never obscurely. Nonspecialists will marvel at the electronic location techniques of the platypus and the jet-propulsion travel of the squid, astonishing evidence of how nature has anticipated modern human ingenuity. As in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (1976), the biology comes laced with antireligious polemic, even the unifying metaphor of a pilgrimage intended to discredit the faith of traditional pilgrims. But then Dawkins does not reserve his iconoclasm for scriptural doctrines: challenging the scientific orthodoxy of evolutionary improbability, he asserts that if the planet's chronological tape were rewound and played again, the dynamics of biochemistry would once again yield microbes, mammals, and man. Lively and daring, a book certain to draw even casual readers deep into the adventure--and controversy--of science. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


From Book News, Inc.
Basing his account loosely on the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, popular science writer Dawkins (public understanding of science, Oxford U.) offers a broad look at human evolution, which incorporates recent developments in the discipline and his own provocative views.Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


Kirkus Reviews, Starred
"One of Dawkins's best: a big, almost encyclopedic compendium bursting with information and ideas."


Review
"The most modest and winning of his eight books." --John Horgan, Discover


Book Description
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.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE CONCEIT OF HINDSIGHTHistory has been described as one damnthing after another. The remark can be seen as awarning against a pair of temptations but, duly warned, I shall cautiouslyflirt with both. First, the historian is tempted to scour the past for patternsthat repeat themselves; or at least, following Mark Twain, to seekreason and rhyme for everything. This appetite for pattern affronts thosewho insist that, as Mark Twain will also be found to have said, "History isusually a random, messy affair", going nowhere and following no rules.The second connected temptation is the vanity of the present: of seeingthe past as aimed at our own time, as though the characters in history"splay had nothing better to do with their lives than foreshadow us.Under names that need not trouble us, these are live issues in humanhistory and they arise with greater force, and no greater agreement, onthe longer timescale of evolution. Evolutionary history can be representedas one damn species after another. But many biologists will joinme in finding this an impoverished view. Look at evolution that way andyou miss most of what matters. Evolution rhymes, patterns recur. Andthis doesn"t just happen to be so. It is so for well-understood reasons:Darwinian reasons mostly, for biology, unlike human history or evenphysics, already has its grand unifying theory, accepted by all informedpractitioners, though in varying versions and interpretations. In writingevolutionary history I do not shrink from seeking patterns and principles,but I try to be careful about it.What of the second temptation, the conceit of hindsight, the idea thatthe past works to deliver our particular present? The late Stephen JayGould rightly pointed out that a dominant icon of evolution in popularmythology, a caricature almost as ubiquitous as lemmings jumping overcliffs (and that myth is false too), is a shambling file of simian ancestors,rising progressively in the wake of the erect, striding, majestic figure ofHomo sapiens sapiens: man as evolution"s last word (and in this context italways is man rather than woman); man as what the whole enterprise ispointing towards; man as a magnet, drawing evolution from the past towardshis eminence.There is a physicist"s version which is less obviously vainglorious andwhich I should mention in passing. This is the "anthropic" notion that thevery laws of physics themselves, or the fundamental constants of the universe,are a carefully tuned put-up job, calculated to bring humanityeventually into existence. It is not necessarily founded on vanity. Itdoesn"t have to mean that the universe was deliberately made in orderthat we should exist. It need mean only that we are here, and we couldnot be in a universe that lacked the capability of producing us. As physicistshave pointed out, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, forstars are a necessary part of any universe capable of generating us. Again,this does not imply that stars exist in order to make us. It is just thatwithout stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the periodictable, and a chemistry of only three elements is too impoverished tosupport life. Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kindof universe where what you see is stars.But there is a little more that needs to be said. Granted the trivialfact that our presence requires physical laws and constants capable ofproducing us, the existence of such potent ground rules may still seemtantalisingly improbable. Depending upon their assumptions, physicistsmay reckon that the set of possible universes vastly outnumbers that subsetwhose laws and constants allowed physics to mature, via stars intochemistry and via planets into biology. To some, this means that thelaws and constants must have been deliberately premeditated from thestart (although it baffles me why anybody regards this as an explanationfor anything, given that the problem so swiftly regresses to the larger oneof explaining the existence of the equally fine-tuned and improbablePremeditator).Other physicists are less confident that the laws and constants werefree to vary in the first place. When I was little it was not obvious to mewhy five times eight had to give the same result as eight times five. Iaccepted it as one of those facts that grownups assert. Only later did Iunderstand, perhaps through visualising rectangles, why such pairs ofmultiplications are not free to vary independently of one another. Weunderstand that the circumference and the diameter of a circle are notindependent, otherwise we might feel tempted to postulate a plethora ofpossible universes, each with a different value of. Perhaps, argue somephysicists such as the Nobel Prize-winning theorist StevenWeinberg, thefundamental constants of the universe, which at present we treat as independentof one another, will in some Grand Unified fullness of time beunderstood to have fewer degrees of freedom than we now imagine.Maybe there is only one way for a universe to be. That would underminethe appearance of anthropic coincidence.Other physicists, including Sir Martin Rees, the present AstronomerRoyal, accept that there is a real coincidence in need of explanation, andexplain it by postulating many actual universes existing in parallel, mutuallyincommunicado, each with its own set of laws and constants.* Obviouslywe, who find ourselves reflecting upon such things, must be inone of those universes, however rare, whose laws and constants are capableof evolving us.The theoretical physicist Lee Smolin added an ingenious Darwinianspin which reduces the apparent statistical improbability of our existence.In Smolin"s model, universes give birth to daughter universes,which vary in their laws and constants. Daughter universes are born inblack holes produced by a parent universe, and they inherit its laws andconstants but with some possibility of small random change — "mutation".Those daughter universes that have what it takes to reproduce (lastlong enough to make black holes, for instance) are, of course, the universesthat pass on their laws and constants to their daughters. Stars areprecursors to black holes which, in the Smolin model, are the birthevents. So universes that have what it takes to make stars are favoured inthis cosmic Darwinism. The properties of a universe that furnish this giftto the future are the self-same properties that incidentally lead to the* This "many universes" idea is not to be confused (though it often is) with Hugh Everett"s "many worlds" interpretation of quantum theory, brilliantly advocated by David Deutsch in The Fabric of Reality. The resemblance between the two theories is superficial and meaningless. Both theories could be true, or neither, or one, or the other. They were proposed to answer completely different problems. In the Everett theory, the different universes don"t differ in their fundamental constants. But it is the entire point of the theory we are here considering that the different universes have differentfundamental constants.manufacture of large atoms, including vital carbon atoms. Not only dowe live in a universe that is capable of producing life. Successive generationsof universes progressively evolve to become increasingly the sort ofuniverse that, as a by-product, is capable of producing life.The logic of the Smolin theory is bound to appeal to a Darwinian, indeedto anyone of imagination, but as for the physics I am not qualifiedto judge. I cannot find a physicist to condemn the theory as definitelywrong — the most negative thing they will say is that it is superfluous.Some, as we saw, dream of a final theory in whose light the alleged finetuningof the universe will turn out to be a delusion anyway. Nothing weknow rules out Smolin"s theory, and he claims for it the merit — whichscientists rate more highly than many laymen appreciate — of testability.His book is The Life of the Cosmos and I recommend it.But that was a digression about the physicist"s version of the conceitof hindsight. The biologist"s version is easier to dismiss since Darwin,though harder before him, and it is our concern here. Biological evolutionhas no privileged line of descent and no designated end. Evolutionhas reached many millions of interim ends (the number of survivingspecies at the time of observation), and there is no reason other thanvanity — human vanity as it happens, since we are doing the talking — todesignate any one as more privileged or climactic than any other.This doesn"t mean, as I shall continue to argue, that there is a totaldearth of reasons or rhymes in evolutionary history. I believe there arerecurring patterns. I also believe, though this is more controversial todaythan it once was, that there are senses in which evolution may be said tobe directional, progressive and even predictable. But progress is emphaticallynot the same thing as progress towards humanity, and we must livewith a weak and unflattering sense of the predictable. The historian mustbeware of stringing together a narrative that seems, even to the smallestdegree, to be homing in on a human climax.A book in my possession (in the main a good book, so I shall notname and shame it) provides an example. It is comparing Homo habilis(a human species, probably ancestral to us) with its predecessors the australopithecines.*What the book says is that Homo habilis was "consider-* The laws of zoological nomenclature follow strict precedence, and I fear there is no hope of changing the name Australopithecus to something less confusing to the contemporary majority who lack a classical education. It has nothing to do with Australia. No member of the genus has ever been found outside Africa. Australo simply means southern. Australia is the great southern continent, the Aurora australis is the southern equivalent of the Aurora borealis (boreal means northern), and Australopithecus wasfirst found in south Africa, in the person of the Taung child.ably more evolved than the Australopithecines".More evolved? What canthis mean but that evolution is moving in some pre-specified direction?The book leaves us in no doubt of what the presumed direction is. "Thefirst signs of a chin are apparent." "First" encourages us to expect secondand third signs, towards a "complete" human chin. "The teeth start to resembleours . . ."As if those teeth were the way they were, not because itsuited the habiline diet but because they were embarking upon the roadtowards becoming our teeth. The passage ends with a telltale remarkabout a later species of extinct human, Homo erectus:Although their faces are still different from ours, they have a muchmore human look in their eyes. They are like sculptures in the making, 'unfinished' works.In the making? Unfinished? Only with the unwisdom of hindsight. Inexcuse of that book it is probably true that, were we to meet a Homo erectusface to face, it might well look to our eyes like an unfinished sculpturein the making. But that is only because we are looking with human hindsight.A living creature is always in the business of surviving in its ownenvironment. It is never unfinished — or, in another sense, it is alwaysunfinished. So, presumably, are we.The conceit of hindsight tempts us at other stages in our history. Fromour human point of view, the emergence of our remote fish ancestors fromwater to land was a momentous step, an evolutionary rite of passage. Itwas undertaken in the Devonian Period by lobe-finned fish a bit likemodern lungfish. We look at fossils of the period with a pardonableyearning to gaze upon our forebears, and are seduced by a knowledge ofwhat came later: drawn into seeing these Devonian fish as "half way" towardsbecoming land animals; everything about them earnestly transitional,bound into an epic quest to invade the land and initiate the nextbig phase of evolution. That is not the way it was at the time. Those Devonianfish had a living to earn. They were not on a mission to evolve,not on a quest towards the distant future. An otherwise excellent book aboutvertebrate evolution contains the following sentence about fish whichventured out of the water on to the land at the end of the Devonian Periodand jumped the gap, so to speak, from one vertebrate class to anotherto become the first amphibians . . .The "gap" comes from hindsight. There was nothing resembling a gap atthe time, and the "classes" that we now recognise were no more separate,in those days, than two species. As we shall see again, jumping gaps is notwhat evolution does.It makes no more sense (and no less) to aim our historical narrativetowards Homo sapiens than towards any other modern species — Octopusvulgaris, say, or Panthera leo or Sequoia sempervirens. A historicallyminded swift, understandably proud of flight as self-evidently the premieraccomplishment of life, will regard swiftkind — those spectacularflying machines with their swept-back wings, who stay aloft for a yearat a time and even copulate in free flight — as the acme of evolutionaryprogress. To build on a fancy of Steven Pinker, if elephants could writehistory they might portray tapirs, elephant shrews, elephant seals andproboscis monkeys as tentative beginners along the main trunk road ofevolution, taking the first fumbling steps but each — for some reason —never quite making it: so near yet so far. Elephant astronomers mightwonder whether, on some other world, there exist alien life formsthat have crossed the nasal rubicon and taken the final leap to fullproboscitude.We are not swifts nor elephants, we are people. As we wander inimagination through some long-dead epoch, it is humanly natural to reservea special warmth and curiosity for whichever otherwise ordinaryspecies in that ancient landscape is our ancestor (it is an intriguingly unfamiliarthought that there is always one such species). It is hard to denyour human temptation to see this one species as "on the main line" ofevolution, the others as supporting cast, walk-on parts, sidelined cameos.Without succumbing to that error, there is one way to indulge a legitimatehuman-centrism while respecting historical propriety. That way isto do our history backwards, and it is the way of this book.Backward chronology in search of ancestors really can sensibly aimtowards a single distant target. The distant target is the grand ancestor ofall life, and we can"t help converging upon it no matter where we start —elephant or eagle, swift or salmonella, wellingtonia or woman. Backwardchronology and forward chronology are each good for different purposes.Go backwards and, no matter where you start, you end up celebratingthe unity of life. Go forwards and you extol diversity. It workson small timescales as well as large. The forward chronology of themammals, within their large but still limited timescale, is a story ofbranching diversification, uncovering the richness of that group of hairywarmbloods. Backward chronology, taking any modern mammal as ourstarting point, will always converge upon the same unique ur-mammal:shadowy, insectivorous, nocturnal contemporary of the dinosaurs. Thisis a local convergence. A yet more local one converges on the most recentancestor of all rodents, who lived somewhere around the time the dinosaurswent extinct. More local still is the backward convergence of allapes (including humans) on their shared ancestor, who lived about 18million years ago. On a larger scale, there is a comparable convergence tobe found if we work backwards from any vertebrate, an even larger convergenceworking backwards from any animal to the ancestor of all animals.The largest convergence of all takes us from any modern creature— animal, plant, fungus or bacterium — back to the universal progenitorof all surviving organisms, probably resembling some kind of bacterium.I used "convergence" in the last paragraph, but I really want to reservethat word for a completely different meaning in forward chronology. Sofor the present purpose I shall substitute "confluence" or, for reasons thatwill make sense in a moment, "rendezvous". I could have used "coalescence",except that, as we shall see, geneticists have already adopted it in amore precise sense, similar to my "confluence" but concentrating ongenes rather than species. In a backward chronology, the ancestors of anyset of species must eventually meet at a particular geological moment.Their point of rendezvous is the last common ancestor that they allshare, what I shall call their "Concestor":* the focal rodent or the focalmammal or the focal vertebrate, say. The oldest concestor is the grandancestor of all surviving life.We can be very sure there really is a single concestor of all survivinglife forms on this planet. The evidence is that all that have ever been examinedshare (exactly in most cases, almost exactly in the rest) the samegenetic code; and the genetic code is too detailed, in arbitrary aspects ofits complexity, to have been invented twice. Although not every specieshas been examined, we already have enough coverage to be pretty certainthat no surprises — alas — await us. If we now were to discover a lifeform sufficiently alien to have a completely different genetic code, itwould be the most exciting biological discovery in my adult lifetime,whether it lives on this planet or another. As things stand, it appears thatall known life forms can be traced to a single ancestor which lived morethan 3 billion years ago. If there were other, independent origins of life,they have left no descendants that we have discovered. And if new onesarose now they would swiftly be eaten, probably by bacteria.The grand confluence of all surviving life is not the same thing as theorigin of life itself. This is because all surviving species presumably sharea concestor who lived after the origin of life: anything else would be anunlikely coincidence, for it would suggest that the original life form im-* I am grateful to Nicky Warren for suggesting this word.mediately branched and more than one of its branches survive to thisday. Current textbook orthodoxy dates the oldest bacterial fossils atabout 3.5 billion years ago, so the origin of life must at least be earlierthan that. If we accept a recent disputation* of these apparently ancientfossils, our dating of the origin of life might be a bit more recent. Thegrand confluence — the last common ancestor of all surviving creatures— could pre-date the oldest fossils (it didn"t fossilise) or it could havelived a billion years later (all but one of the other lineages went extinct).Given that all backward chronologies, no matter where they start,culminate in the one grand confluence, we can legitimately indulge ourhuman preoccupation and concentrate upon the single line of our ownancestors. Instead of treating evolution as aimed towards us, we choosemodern Homo sapiens as our arbitrary, but forgivably preferred, startingpoint for a reverse chronology. We choose this route, out of all possibleroutes to the past, because we are curious about our own greatgrancestors. At the same time, although we need not follow them in detail,we shall not forget that there are other historians, animals and plantsbelonging to other species, who are independently walking backwardsfrom their separate starting points, on separate pilgrimages to visit theirown ancestors, including eventually the ones they share with us. If we retraceour own ancestral steps, we shall inevitably meet these other pilgrimsand join forces with them in a definite order, the order in whichtheir lineages rendezvous with ours, the order of ever more inclusivecousinship.Pilgrimages? Join forces with pilgrims? Yes, why not? Pilgrimage is anapt way to think about our journey to the past. This book will be cast inthe form of an epic pilgrimage from the present to the past. All roadslead to the origin of life. But because we are human, the path we shall followwill be that of our own ancestors. It will be a human pilgrimage todiscover human ancestors. As we go, we shall greet other pilgrims whowill join us in strict order, as we reach the common ancestors we sharewith them.The first fellow pilgrims we shall greet, some 5 million years ago, deep* J.W. Schopf "s much-cited evidence for 3.5 billion-years-old bacteria has been sharply criticised by my Oxford colleague Martin Brasier. Brasier may be right about Schopf "s evidence, but new evidence, published when this book was in proof, may reinstate 3.5 billion years as the date of the oldest fossils. The Norwegian scientist Harald Furnes and his coworkers found tiny holes in volcanic glass of that age in South Africa, which they believe were etched by micro-organisms. These "burrows" contain carbon, which thediscoverers claim is of biological origin. No trace of the micro-organisms themselves remains.in Africa where Stanley memorably shook hands with Livingstone, arethe chimpanzees. The chimpanzee and bonobo pilgrims will alreadyhave joined forces with each other "before" we greet them. And here wehave a little linguistic trickiness which I must face at the outset, before itdogs us any further. I placed "before" in inverted commas because it couldconfuse. I used it to mean before in the backwards sense — "before, in thecourse of the pilgrimage to the past." But that of course means after in thechronological sense, the exact opposite meaning! My guess is that noreader was confused in this particular case, but there will be other instanceswhere the reader"s patience may be tested. While writing thisbook I tried the experiment of coining a new preposition, tailored to thepeculiar needs of a backward historian. But it didn"t fly. Instead, I shalladopt the convention of "before" in inverted commas.When you see "before",remember that it really means after! When you see before, it reallymeans before. And the same for "after" and after, mutatis mutandis.The next pilgrims with whom we shall rendezvous as we push backalong our journey are gorillas, then orang utans (quite a lot deeper intothe past, and probably no longer in Africa). Next we shall greet gibbons,then Old World monkeys, then New World monkeys, then various othergroups of mammals . . . and so on until eventually all the pilgrims of lifeare marching together in one single backward quest for the origin of lifeitself. As we push on back, there will come a time when it is no longermeaningful to name the continent in which a rendezvous takes place: themap of the world was so different, because of the remarkable phenomenonof plate tectonics. And further back still, all rendezvous take place inthe sea.It is a rather surprising fact that we human pilgrims pass only about40 rendezvous points in all, before we hit the origin of life itself. Ateach of the 40 steps we shall find one particular shared ancestor, theConcestor, which will bear the same labelling number as the Rendezvous.For example, Concestor 2, whom we meet at Rendezvous 2, is the mostrecent common ancestor of gorillas on the one hand and {humans +{chimpanzees + bonobos}} on the other. Concestor 3 is the most recentcommon ancestor of orang utans and {{humans + {chimpanzees +bonobos}} + gorillas}. Concestor 39 is the grand ancestor of all survivinglife forms. Concestor 0 is a special case, the most recent ancestor ofall surviving humans.We shall be pilgrims, then, sharing fellowship ever more inclusivelywith other pilgrim bands, which also have been swelling on their ownway to their rendezvous with us. After each meeting, we continue togetheron the high road back to our shared Archaean goal, our "Canter-bury". There are other literary allusions, of course, and I almost madeBunyan my model and Pilgrim"s Regress my title. But it was to Chaucer"sCanterbury Tales that I and my research assistant Yan Wong kept returningin our discussions, and it seemed increasingly natural to think ofChaucer throughout this book.Unlike (most of) Chaucer"s pilgrims, mine do not all set out together,although they do set off at the same time, the present. These otherpilgrims aim towards their ancient Canterbury from different startingpoints, joining our human pilgrimage at various rendezvous along theroad. In this respect, my pilgrims are unlike those who gathered in London"sTabard Inn. Mine are more like the sinister canon and his understandablydisloyal yeoman, who joined Chaucer"s pilgrims at Boughtonunder-Blee, five miles short of Canterbury. Following Chaucer"s lead,mypilgrims, which are all the different species of living creature, will havethe opportunity to tell tales along the way to their Canterbury which isthe origin of life. It is these tales that form the main substance of thisbook.Dead men tell no tales, and extinct creatures such as trilobites aredeemed not to be pilgrims capable of telling them, but I shall make exceptionsof two special classes. Animals such as the dodo, which survivedinto historical times and whose DNA is still available to us, are treated ashonorary members of the modern fauna setting off on pilgrimage at thesame time as us, and joining us at some particular rendezvous. Since weare responsible for their so recent extinction, it seems the least we can do.The other honorary pilgrims, exceptions to the rule that dead men tellno tales, really are men (or women). Since we human pilgrims are directlyseeking our own ancestors, fossils that might plausibly be consideredcandidates for being our ancestors are deemed members of our humanpilgrimage and we shall hear tales from some of these "shadowpilgrims", for example the Handyman, Homo habilis.I decided it would be twee to let my animal and plant tale-tellersspeak in the first person singular, and I shall not do so. Save for occasionalasides and prefatory remarks, Chaucer"s pilgrims don"t either.Many of Chaucer"s Tales have their own Prologue, and some have an too, all written in Chaucer"s own voice as narrator of the pilgrimage.I shall occasionally follow his example. As with Chaucer, an epiloguemay serve as a bridge from one tale to the next.Before his Tales begin, Chaucer has a long General Prologue in whichhe sets out his cast list: the professions and in some cases the names ofthe pilgrims who are about to set off from the tavern. Instead, I shall introducenew pilgrims as they join us. Chaucer"s jovial host offers to guidethe pilgrims, and encourages them to tell their tales to while away thejourney. In my role as host I shall use the General Prologue for some preparatory remarks about methods and problems of reconstructing evolutionary history, which must be faced and solved whether we do our history backwards or forwards.Then we shall embark on our backwards history itself. Although weshall concentrate on our own ancestors, noting other creatures usuallyonly when they join us, we shall from time to time look up from ourroad and remind ourselves that there are other pilgrims on their ownmore or less independent routes to our ultimate destination. The numberedrendezvous milestones, plus a few intermediate markers necessaryto consolidate the chronology, will provide the scaffolding for our journey.Each will mark a new chapter, where we halt to take stock of our pilgrimage,and maybe listen to a tale or two. On rare occasions, somethingimportant happens in the world around us, and then our pilgrims maypause briefly to reflect on it. But, for the most part, we shall mark ourprogress to the dawn of life by the measure of those 40 natural milestones,the trysts that enrich our pilgrimage.Copyright © 2004 by Richard Dawkins. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

James Trefil - The Washington Post

This is great stuff -- intriguingly written, honest about the controversies that exist, clear about the science. Dawkins does not dodge complexity where it is called for but keeps it to a minimum and winds up giving us as full and clear a picture of the way life developed on our planet as you are likely to find anywhere.

Carl Zimmer - The New York Times

Dawkins, the author of the scientific classics The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, is an excellent guide, both a profoundly original scientific thinker and a marvelously adept explainer.

Publishers Weekly

The diversity of the earth's plant and animal life is amazing especially when one considers the near certainty that all living things can trace their lineage back to a single ancestor a bacterium that lived more than three billion years ago. Taking his cue from Chaucer, noted Oxford biologist Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, etc.) works his way narratively backward through time. As the path reaches points where humanity's ancestors converge with those of other species primates, mammals, amphibians and so on various creatures have tales that carry an evolutionary lesson. The peacock, for example, offers a familiar opportunity to discuss sexual selection, which is soon freshly applied to the question of why humans started walking upright. These passages maintain an erudite yet conversational voice whether discussing the genetic similarities between hippos and whales (a fact "so shocking that I am still reluctant to believe it") or the existence of prehistoric rhino-sized rodents. The book's accessibility is crucial to its success, helping to convince readers that, given a time span of millions of years, unlikely events, like animals passing from one continent to another, become practically inevitable. This clever approach to our extended family tree should prove a natural hit with science readers. Agent, John Brockman. (Oct. 6) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Because the DNA of humans and chimpanzees is so similar, the two species must have had a common ancestor in the recent evolutionary past. Even further back, prior species also went through a succession of earliest common ancestors, all the way to the bacterial origins of life on Earth. Blending tools of scientific rigor and theoretical frontiers, noted biologist and science writer Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) pushes deep into the evolutionary past, through 39 such "rendezvous points" where species coalesced, back to the original most common ancestors of all living things. He models this odyssey as a Chaucerian "pilgrimage," which at over 500 pages wears as a somewhat overwrought analogy of suspect literary effectiveness ("The Cauliflower's Tale"?). Still, the book's scope and provocativeness are truly worthy of epic treatment, and Dawkins is skilled in simultaneously conveying cutting-edge science to the public and also contributing to its advancement. For most libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/04.] Gregg Sapp, Science Lib., SUNY at Albany Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews