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    The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
    The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
    The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
    Audiobook (abridged)8 hours

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

    Written by Richard Dawkins

    Narrated by Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward

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    About this audiobook

    In The Ancestor's Tale, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins offers a masterwork: an exhilarating reverse tour through evolution, from present-day humans back to the microbial beginnings of life four billion years ago.


    Throughout the journey Dawkins spins entertaining, insightful stories and sheds light on topics such as speciation, sexual selection, and extinction. The Ancestor's Tale is at once an essential education in evolutionary theory and riveting in its telling.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 24, 2015
    ISBN9781494581329
    Author

    Richard Dawkins

    RICHARD DAWKINS is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. He is the author of 15 books includingUnweaving the Rainbow, A Devil’s Chaplain, and The God Delusion.Dawkins lives in Oxford.,

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    Reviews for The Ancestor's Tale

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      A lot of good information. The double narration through me off though. I couldn’t focus as well, and it didn’t flow well either. Come on Dawkins. Ha
    • 4/5
      Very, very interesting stuff. Made me want to be a geneticist.
    • 5/5
      Richard Dawkins a biology goat. I love how he writes this evolutionary book from present to past instead of past to present.
    • 4/5
      The author presents a review of human evolution backwards through time as a journey. Even as a religious man I enjoyed his passion and the narrative, despite the author's open opposition to my faith. My only problem was when he delved at length into the politics of race, feeling the need to give an extended lecture on equality and racial differences. He even goes so far as to use the word "wicked"when discussing the subject - which makes the self-described non-religious author come across as an orthodox devotee of his Leftist political dogma. Despite this failing, the book was good and I enjoyed it.
    • 5/5
      One of Dawkins' best. While I agree with him wholeheartedly, Dawkins is a better writer when he's talking primarily about science, and not religion. Here, working within a framework, he manages to be utterly convincing and constantly astounds you with facts about nature and evolution. Love it.
    • 4/5
      Good reference book for understanding biology if you have a personal interest. It was helpful to bring me to an understanding of environmental adaptations and specializations for. surviving change or becoming better at a nitch.
    • 5/5
      Masterly as ever. As a non-scientist I found it clear and easy to understand (apart from a few sections about creatures I'd never heard of). Little touches of humour or personal experience help to lighten what is really a hefty magnum opus covering the whole history and origins of life on earth. as the story delves deeper into the past and into the oceans, you get a sense of how tiny and perhaps accidental is Man; like looking into deep space .Heard an abridged version on audio some years back (of which I remember little); Worth a third reading.
    • 3/5
      This was a massive tome of a book for someone like me, who does not have a significant background in science. Nonetheless, it was well-written for most of the book and I felt that it had a lot to offer the reader. It educated, elucidated, and explained many different facets and facts about genetics that would have otherwise escaped me entirely. A good effort and a good book. I would recommend it for those interested in science and genetics.
    • 5/5
      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 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.
    • 5/5
      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 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.
    • 3/5
      Follow the evolutionary trail back through time from modern Homo sapiens sapiens to the dawn of life on Earth, noting where our line branches to those of all other living species. It's a lengthy work with more details on various species and biochemistry than most casual readers would probably want to see, but it provides an excellent sense of the great diversity of life and how it is all connected.
    • 3/5
      A massive sweep back through evolution to our ancestors. So detailed, and so many ideas.Read Apr 2005
    • 4/5
      What an odd book. At times it's written for beginners and other times for folks with a bachelors in biology or some other science. I listened to the audiobook version and it has two narrators, Dawkins and Lalla Ward, and they switch back and forth mid-paragraph, without reason, making it extremely difficult to follow. In some cases they switched mid-sentence almost word for word back and forth, strange and completely distracting. I've never heard an audio production like this before and probably never will again, it was not successful. I also found the frame-tale around Chaucer to be gimmicky, what does Chaucer have to do with biology and evolution, there's no depth to the analogy other than a surface comparison of going on a journey, might as well have chosen The Wizard of Oz and the Yellow Brick Road. No doubt there is good stuff here but it comes and goes, and sometimes I zoned out among the invention of the wheel by bacteria. Probably the one thing that I will remember long term is the idea of a "ring species", very cool.
    • 4/5
      Good interesting strong read. I would really like to read an updated version too, if Dawkins ever manages to revisit this mighty tome.
    • 4/5
      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, 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.
    • 5/5
      Charming and packed with detail. Dawkins' eloquence and passion for his subject is a real treat to enjoy.
    • 4/5
      Evolution told as a journey from human to the origin of life. Written in a beautiful way it gives a catching view of life and how biology investigates it.
    • 5/5
      Although I understood the concept of evolution prior to reading this book, I now feel like my brain has been wrenched open and I have whole new, much deeper and broader understanding of how it all worked. This book changed the way I think. It is so well constructed and written that it taught me more about science than six years at high school. This book should be on everyone's must read list.
    • 5/5
      While I read different genres, I only review books with a religious content. So, if I may be excused for one of my “liberal Christian rants,” let me say this: It’s a sad day when a book about evolution earns a spot on the shelves of a religion blog. It simply astounds me that half of all Americans still do not believe in evolution. The evidence is so overwhelmingly against a young earth that if Christianity is going to survive, it must pull its head out of the sand and reinterpret the Bible’s creation story (anything but a literal interpretation!) before it alienates the coming generation, who will simply know better.This book will help. I’m not a fan of Dawkins’ anti-religion tirades, but when he sticks to his evolutionary biology, his writing is a pure delight. It’s insightful, highly intelligent, and witty. The subtitle of the book is A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, and it’s a long journey backward in time from present-day humans to the beginnings of life four million years ago.You’ll meet Cro-Magnon man, the Neanderthals, chimpanzees and gorillas, monkeys, rodents and rabbits, reptiles, sharks, flatworms, sponges, fungi, plants, and far more, each with their own unique role and story to tell.Scientific understanding is, and ever will be, in a state of transition. As we learn, we shape our theories to fit the facts. It’s an exploration that never ends, an exciting quest for truth that Dawkins excels in sharing. He stops often along this journey back in time to introduce interesting life forms and their evolutionary sidebars, evoking wonder and appreciation for the real creation story that far exceeds any ancient tales. It’s such a treat that I’m almost envious of long-time creationists who can, by opening their minds and turning the cover of this book, open themselves up to a new world of wonder.You will see the world in a different way after reading this.
    • 5/5
      I can´t remember having read (listened to) a book that has taught me so much, while at the same time having been so entertaining, illmuniating, brilliant - and irreverent. Richard Dawkins is a brilliant narrator, and he manages to make the history of evolution come alive. At the same time HE comes alive, because his personality, his visions and outlook on life breathe from every page. He is so compassionate about his subject area that no-one can come away from this book without feeling awed. There is a sense of wonder in The Ancestor´s tale that sadly is missing from his God Delusion, even though he can be as scathingly hard to his scientific enemies as to his religious.Is Richard Dawkins the People´s Scientist? Yes, I believe so. More than Stephen Hawkins he makes the reader understand (although I probably have to read the book at least once more to understand most of it, but I am not a scientist). At times the book is a bit too long and detailed, but keep reading (listening), it always gets better.
    • 5/5
      A fascinating journey into the distant past of human ancestry, using Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales as a model. As usual with Dawkins, it is eloquently written and entertaining.
    • 4/5
      While the subject matter is fascinating, at times the writing is pointlessly confusing. I often felt as though he was explaining things backwards, so that I only understood a concept after it was fully explained. Perhaps I think backwards.
    • 5/5
      A sweeping, yet in depth journey back through our family tree to the most distant common ancestor shared by all life on earth. I will never look at a living thing in the same way again, knowing how we have all branched off and diverged from that long vanished bit of DNA that first began to replicate itself. This book is a wonderful overview of evolution, but I would not recommend it to those who are new to the science (or science in general). Dawkins is easy to read but his subject matter is rather deep and takes some time to digest.
    • 4/5
      Dawkins takes his readers on an imagined journey back through time, tracing our evolutionary history by visiting the milestones that mark our common ancestry with other modern species as they make their own backwards voyages. At each such meeting, he focuses on one or more of these fellow evolutionary pilgrims as a jumping off point to discuss some aspect of evolution.It's a terrific premise for a book, though in practice I think it ends up being a little bit of a mixed bag, as this structure inevitably makes the whole thing a little bit disjointed. We jump around from topic to topic, with the subject of any particular "tale" often only very tangentially related to the animal that has supposedly inspired it. Sections describing very basic tenets of evolutionary theory are interspersed with others that are possibly more fiddly and technical that the average reader really needs, and concepts alluded to in early chapters may sometimes not be properly introduced until late in the book.However, all that being said, it's also true that any time I started to find things a little bit tedious, Dawkins would suddenly wow me with an absolutely fascinating set of discussions, ideas or facts, written with great enthusiasm and clarity, and get me all excited again.I also have to praise Dawkins' thoughtful precision here. He's always very, very careful to make sure that readers are not confused or misled by scientific jargon or by figures of speech, and he is also conscientious about acknowledging what the various alternative hypotheses are when some fact or concept is subject to scientific dispute. Less praise-worthy is his occasional jarring indulgence in political snark in contexts where it really doesn't belong, but fortunately there are only a few small examples of that.
    • 5/5
      The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins is a tour of life from homo sapiens to the lowliest (?) bacteria by following the trail from man through all “concestors.” Richard Dawkins is a zoologist by training and has the ability to clarify many steps of evolution with apparent ease. He has written several books prior to this, this one being described as a “magnum opus” on the cover. If anything he is dogmatic in two ways, first he is the most evolutionists of evolutionists’ and second he espouses his agnosticism if not atheism to the point he wants us to believe his view without question. The Ancestor’s Tale goes through thirty-nine concestors which have all gone before man, not that man is the ultimate organism, but actually a convenient starting point for the start of this quest. The rendezvous are clear and much information is provided in addition to the organism itself, explaining the changes and basic evolution which had to occur. The book is quite the tome, at 619 pages, it was not a day or two read, but the different segments, “the rendezvous” are coherent are very readable, pulling the reader along with clear and succinct descriptions. The later segments were more difficult to get through, maybe because I was less interested or the pattern was becoming too repetitious. Aside from the author’s own proselytizing and the length of the book I found this book a fascinating read, and one I found worth the effort. I give this book a 4.5.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      Dawkins is a great science writer and this is a great book. You get a bit scared when you see the size of it and the detail about all the creatures that join this pilgrimage, but it is a highly enjoyable and enlightening read.
    • 4/5
      very very good book.
    • 3/5
      Better known for his "The God Delusion" and his aggressive atheism, this book is actually what Dawkins does for a living: good science, well-described. But it is like no other science book. He works his way back down (up?) the tree of life, identifying each significant branching, and uses as his literary structure Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It gives each unique change and animal character a short, sweet description, making this long book a very zippy read.
    • 3/5
      A detailed look at evolution and the history of animal life of Earth. The style is modelled on Chaucer's Canterbury tales. For reasons's that become clear Dawkins, retraces the ancestors of the human specis through a series of "Concestors" - a species that was alive and whose descendants evolved into different branches of "the tree of life" the style is very clear, without use of overly complicated termiology - resulting in at times a simplistic overview, though this is usually acknowledged.Because the initial lineage chosen is human, the drawback to this journey is that several major groups diverged from us so long ago, that entire interesting groups are given only a page or two's treatment. The entire plant kingdom gets only a chapter. Various nominated species are chosen at each concester point to give Tale - and like Chaucer's original work - each tale has a point, not necessarily on evolution, some worthy commentary on the accompanying science, assumptions etc are made. Unfortunetly the science of dating the various records is left until the Redwood's tale, more than 3/4 of the way through the book. Some of the personal commentary from dawkins is more belivable, and given more evidence, than others. Sometimes he states his opinion is contentious, but in my view, there is room for more doubt than he sometimes credits. Overall it is a worthy tour through the history of the animal kingdom, back to the origin of single celled entities at the dawn of time - but missing much detail that could be covered. A useful reference rather than a detailed guide.