Susan Lumpkin, Review: The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins (2005)

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution. Richard Dawkins. 2004. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. 673 pp., hardbound. $28.

The Ancestor's Tale has all the makings of a "trophy book." Written by renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who bears the lofty title of Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, it is a must-buy for people aspiring to be—and appearing to be—intellectually au courant. However, at 673 pages, it is likely to be guiltily shelved, unread, after an appropriately long stint on the coffee table. "After all," people are wont to think about a book such as this, "I'm busy, and I did read all the reviews."

I admit to having more than my fair share of trophy books, and I assume that, like me, many ZooGoer readers quail at the prospects of ever finding time to read so many pages. So I started reading The Ancestor's Tale expecting not even to come close to finishing it, much less reviewing it here. As a rule, I choose books to review only if I think you can read them with pleasure, and learn some interesting biology, in the course of a few Metro commutes or between chores on a couple of weekend afternoons.

If ever there has been an excuse for breaking this rule, The Ancestor's Tale is it. Let me encourage you, no, urge you, to scrape time from your hectic schedule, gather up your intellectual courage, and take an amazing adventure through the four-billion-year-long history of life on Earth with the smartest, funniest, most exuberant tour guide one can imagine.

Taken all together, The Ancestor's Tale is sort of an uber-lecture on evolution delivered by an equally uber professor who, by dint of his erudition, his passion for the subject, and his irrepressible desire to share both, holds his class in thrall until, long—very long—after the bell has rung, his amazed students have learned seemingly all there is to know about what we know about the history of life on Earth.

Traveling backward in time, Dawkins invites readers to meet our ever-more distant ancestors at 40 rendezvous—points in time when our most recent ancestors joined up with their most recent ancestors until all converge on a single ancestor from which all of surviving life evolved. (Thus, Rendezvous 1, some five to seven million years ago, is when humans shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees. Rendezvous 2 marks the common ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees on the one hand, and gorillas on the other, and so on until Rendezvous 39 when the common ancestor of humans, invertebrates, fungi, plants, and others, was a bacterium.)

At each rendezvous, and other rest stops along the road, Dawkins stops to tell fascinating tales about particular species that illuminate some principle of evolutionary biology—from the first, "The Farmer's Tale" that discusses domestication, to the penultimate, "The Rhizobium's Tale," which takes on the creationist theory of "intelligent design" with a story of the only creatures to have evolved a true wheel for locomotion, to the last, "The Taq's Tale," with its surprising conclusion that we humans are "more similar to some bacteria than some bacteria are to other bacteria."

Dawkins writes with great clarity and wit, most evident when at his opinionated best he skewers the ideas of those he disagrees with. I can't help quoting my favorite such passage at length: "Creationists love the Cambrian Explosion [a time from which huge numbers of fossils of very diverse forms occur compared to before] because it seems, to their carefully impoverished imaginations, to conjure a sort of paleontological orphanage inhabited by parentless phyla: animals without antecedents, as if they had suddenly materialized overnight from nothing, complete with holes in their socks. At the other extreme, romantically overheated zoologists love the Cambrian Explosion for its aura of Arcadian Dreamtime, a zoological age of innocence in which life danced to a frenzied and radically different evolutionary tempo: a prelapsarian bacchanalia of leaping improvisation before a fall into the earnest utilitarianism that has prevailed since." More succinctly, referring to one theory about this same explosion, he writes, "This third school of thought is, in my opinion, bonkers."

I don't want to mislead you: This book is not always an easy read. It is replete with arcane terminology and covers some very complex concepts. (Before launching into "The Gibbon's Tale," Dawkins warns, "Readers should either don their thinking caps for the next twelve pages, or skip now to page 137. . ."). But don't let this deter you—there will not be a test. Just skip along and read the good parts, many of which you won't be able to resist reciting to whomever will listen. Don't worry about understanding, far less remembering, all of "the extravaganza of details." Rather, let The Ancestor's Tale amaze and delight you with the fact that, thanks to evolution, "there are any such details to be had at all, on any planet." Hit the road, take the pilgrimage.

—Susan Lumpkin

ZooGoer 34(2) 2005. Copyright 2005 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.