I’ve never written a book review before – you’ve been warned!
Anyone interested in evolution is familiar with common descent. When it is mentioned, it is often followed by the dry statement that “all life on Earth is descended from a single common ancestor”. How boring! Common descent is immensely more interesting than these 11 words. Let’s take two species alive today, otters (because they’re cool) and giant pandas (even cooler). Common descent dictates that there once must have lived a single creature, which became the ancestor of all otters and Giant Pandas! You can play this game for any combination of species you’d like. For some sets of species, the ancestor will have lived a long time ago (the ancestor of tulips and wolves), whereas for others the ancestor lived recently (for humans and chimps).
In his book The Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins traces back this ancestry of life on earth, starting with us humans. As we follow Dawkins back in time, other species join humans on the journey that will lead deep into the tree of life. The most closely related species to humans, like chimpanzees and gorillas, join first, while more distantly related species join later in the book. But before the endpoint is reached, every single living thing on earth (including otters and pandas) will have joined the travelling band. Dawkins likens this journey to a pilgrimage and all species to pilgrims, like Chaucer’s pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. Just like Chaucer’s pilgrims, many of the species that join the journey have stories to tell. In these stories, Dawkins unfolds different facets of evolution.
Book cover from "Martin the Warrior", a book in the Redwall series, featuring sword-wielding mice, tyrannic cats and heroic badgers. Anthropomorphic animals are cool.
Dawkins tells most of these tales well, using clever analogies to make difficult concepts clear. It is clear that he has been writing popular scientific literature for decades, because he effortlessly picks out interesting examples from nature to make his points. For example, the Bdelloid Rotifers have been reproducing asexually for millions of years, so the Rotifer’s tale (Ed Yong has blogged about them before) becomes a tale about the role of asexual and sexual reproduction in evolution.
This system works amazingly well, and the stories about the strange organisms that inhabit our earth kept me interested in the book. Dawkins, being a zoologist by training, does spend an awful lot of pages to the animal branch of the tree. By the time fungi join the pilgrimage, we’re already on page 500, with only 100 more to go! The fungi themselves have to make do with 4 measly pages. Rather sad, for such a large and varied group of creatures. While Dawkins is explicit in stating that his journey is one that starts from the human point of view, he would have done more justice to life on earth if he had taken more time for plants, fungi, protists and bacteria.
Richard Dawkins being Richard Dawkins, natural selection and adaptation are the leading stars of the book. Random genetic drift (excellent blogpost on drift by Psi Wavefunction here) does make a small appearance, but only in explaining its relevance for molecular dating. It’s role in generating or fixating complexity is ignored. Besides genetic drift, other debated topics in evolutionary biology receive a lopsided treatment as well. You should not expect a balanced view on the current state of evolution when reading this book by Dawkins. I wonder if there’s any book in popular scientific literature that can do justice to the complexity of evolution (without putting adaptation on a pedestal, or claiming that biologists have been wrong for the past 150 years).
One last thing to note, before this small review comes to an end. Personally, I think it’s a pity Dawkins chose not to tell the story from the pilgrim’s perspectives. Having grown up devouring Redwall books and watching Watership Down, I’m all for anthropomorphizing animals! The book would have been way more interesting from a literary point of view. I would have loved passages like this:
As the sun set, the band of pilgrims was making its way through the warm jungles of the Upper Creteaceous. A feeling of unease fell over the Squirrel. He couldn’t shake the feeling of being followed. Nervously, he turned towards the wise Orangutan: “Orangutan? Do you also feel.. afraid?”. The Orangutan laughed: “We’ve got nothing to be afraid of, my rodent friend. We’re on a pilgrimage towards the origin of life. It is inevitable that even our predators will join us, at some point.”. How right he was. All mammalian carnivores, including the black Panther staring at them from the dark, were about to join the pilgrimage.
That book, if it ever will be written, will be awesome.
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Nice review! The Ancestor’s Tale is by far my favourite Dawkins book, I love the way it’s written and set out and its general attitude towards finding the last common ancestor.
On a different note, I *loved* the Redwall books when I was younger (the uncertain morality grates on me a bit nowadays unfortunately). “Pearls of Lutra” was my favourite, followed closely by “Mattemio” (which I liked because it had child protagonists, and I was a child). Dawkins could have had such fun anthropomorphising cuttle-fish and tardigrades
I don’t want to get started on the Amazingness of Watership Down though or this post will turn into an essay. Did you ever read the book? I still go back to it even now, it’s an amazing piece of writing on many different levels.
Exactly! It would have been a nice challenge for Dawkins, and a refreshing change from his usual ‘I know best’-style of writing. Anthromorphic animals work on so many levels.. As a reader I can better identify myself with the subjects, yet appreciate their different nature and characteristics.
‘Mossflower’ is my favourite in the Redwall series.. The mythical Martin from ‘Redwall’ now became a real character, one to be admired, but not infallible.
I’ve read Watership Down and loved it. It’s amazing how Richard Adams was able to show the British countryside from a Rabbit’s perspective, a world in which hrududus can’t be trusted.