The Ancestor's Tale

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

First edition (UK)
Author	Richard Dawkins & Yan Wong
Language	English
Subject	Evolutionary biology
Publisher	Houghton Mifflin (US) Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK)
Publication date	1st edition 2004, 2nd edition 2016
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print
Pages	673 pages in 1st edition and expanded to 800 pages in 2nd ed.
ISBN	978-0544859937
OCLC	1062329664
Dewey Decimal	576.8 22
LC Class	QH361 .D39 2004
Preceded by	A Devil's Chaplain
Followed by	The God Delusion

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life is a popular science book by Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong in which the history of life is retraced in reverse chronological order. A growing band of species meet their most recent common ancestors (concestors) at 40 rendezvous points. First published in 2004, it was updated in 2016 to reflect recent discoveries. Many reviewers described it as Dawkins's magnum opus. Dawkins dedicated the book to John Maynard Smith.

Background

The book is patterned on Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, in which pilgrims on the road to Canterbury converge with other travellers and tell tales. Here, species convene with their common ancestors ("concestors"), and "Canterbury" is the origin of life.

The epigraph is from Mark Twain: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." The authors contend that this is true of evolution.

The book was revised in 2016: The Denisovan's Tale replaces The Neanderthal's Tale and The Elephant Bird's Tale has been updated. The Mudskipper's Tale was present in the first edition but not the second. The Armadillo's Tale, about biogeography, is now The Sloth's Tale. The phylogenetic trees in the second edition are based on OneZoom evolutionary mapping software.

Each Tale illustrates an aspect of evolution. Thus, for example, The Galápagos Finch's Tale is about natural selection, The Peacock's Tale is about sexual selection, The Salamander's Tale is about speciation, and The Barnacle's Tale is about how appearances can be deceiving.

Contents

Dawkins begins with humans and moves outwards through successively larger groups, such as primates, placental mammals, mammals (including marsupials), chordates, animals, eukaryotes, and all organisms (including prokaryotes) to illustrate aspects of evolution.

On humans, for example, "The Farmer's Tale" tells of the Neolithic Revolution, when humans domesticated plants and animals through artificial selection. On primates, "The Chimpanzee's Tale" is about comparative genomics, specifically the comparison of human and chimpanzee genomes. On mammals, "The Beaver's Tale" is about the Extended Phenotype, which in beavers includes their evolutionarily hard-wired ability to build dams, while "The Marsupial Mole's Tale" is about convergent evolution: it is not a mole, but resembles one as it has evolved to fill a similar niche.

On chordates, the "Galapagos Finch's Tale" is about natural selection's ability to produce rapid evolutionary change, as when drought created selective pressure for longer beaks capable of cracking tough seeds in one species of finch: beak length increased rapidly. "The Leafy Sea Dragon's Tale" is about the plasticity of animal forms. Evolution has moulded many fishes into strange shapes: The leafy sea dragon hangs motionless among kelp, which it resembles. "The Lancelet's Tale" tells that all living animals have had equal time to evolve since the first concestor, and that no living animal should be described as either lower or more primitive, however simple it may look.

On animals, "The Ragworm's Tale" is about the evolution of left-right symmetry. Dawkins discusses the evolution of eyes, which all develop under the control of the same genes, despite their very different structures in groups such as insects and mammals, while "The Rotifer's Tale" is about the evolution of sex. Rotifers reproduce via parthenogenesis. Through mitosis, they produce eggs which yield genetically identical daughters: they have been asexual for millions of years. John Maynard Smith called this "an evolutionary scandal." The authors write that sex may be the real scandal. Why do we do it? It might be an evolutionary arms race against parasites.

On eukaryotes, "The Choanoflagellate's Tale" is about the evolution of multicellularity. Choanoflagellates can form temporary colonies from a free-living unicellular stage. Sponges have choanocytes, cells that resemble single-celled choanoflagellates, suggesting how multicellularity evolved. "The Mixotrich's Tale" is about symbiosis. Mixotricha paradoxa has bacteria, specifically spirochaetes, which serve Mixotricha as galley slaves in place of cilia to propel itself. Mixotricha is a symbiont, helping its host termites digest cellulose. The authors describe the origin of eukaryotic cells and Lynn Margulis's endosymbiotic theory. Mitochondrion and chloroplasts have their own DNA and divide by binary fission, like bacteria. Margulis surmised that this is because they are descended from free-living bacteria.

Finally, on living organisms including prokaryotes, "The Rhizobium's Tale" is about the evolution of the bacterial flagellum, likely from a Type II secretion system. Despite the diversity of animal body plans, wheels seem only to have evolved once.

Reception

Carl Zimmer of the New York Times wrote that it is one of the best books to understand evolutionary trees.

Rob Colwell of the Wall Street Journal called it "a fittingly superior beast -- lavishly produced and, weighing in at 1.6 kilograms, substantially heavier than the fully-evolved human brain that thought it up."

Clive Cookson of the Financial Times called it "one of the richest accounts of evolution ever written. It is also an object lesson in the way thorough picture research, carefully commissioned illustrations and good design can enhance even the best text." He adds "He is so good at explaining complex scientific issues that readers will learn painlessly about matters well outside the author's field of evolutionary biology, from maths to cosmology. But he interlaces the hard science with 'pleasing speculations', humorous asides, personal anecdotes and even political observations." He concludes "we have no right to expect a second magnum opus on the scale of The Ancestor's Tale."

Marek Kohn wrote "The success of this book comes from having one truly Chaucerian character: the author himself."

Robin McKie in The Guardian thought it awkward to move backward in time starting from humans and thought this required linguistic gymnastics. Matt Ridley, in the same publication, appreciated the approach of a Chaucerian Pilgrim traveling backwards and the perspective of not seeing other animals as failures.

Jody Hey notes that Dawkins "writes engagingly on evolutionary topics. With a highly self-assured style, he effortlessly draws insightful connections among disparate notions, trapping the curiosity of readers before they know what's coming." However, he says "An unfortunate editorial oversight is seen in the text's occasional straying into political commentary. Worse still, Dawkins at one point chastises Richard Lewontin, the great population geneticist, for sometimes interjecting politics into scientific discourse. This little touch of hypocrisy is hard to miss if you read the entire volume. But such lapses amount to a few dozen words in a weighty, truly wonderful book."

Steve Jones calls it "a rigorous and impressively complete account of the Tree of Life… The Ancestor's Tale achieves the almost impossible: it makes biology (not biochemistry, brain science, or bird-watching, but biology as a whole) interesting again. Everyone possessed of a cell nucleus should read it, and ponder their own unimportance. One mystery remains: what did the star-nosed mole say to the duck-billed platypus?"

Translations

Translations

Edition	Name	Translator	Year
Bulgarian	Сказанието на прадедите	Krassimira Mateva (Красимира Матева)	2013
Chinese (Traditional)	祖先的故事
Czech	Příběh předka	Pavel Růt	2008
Danish	Vores forfædres fortælling	Lotte Follin	2019 (2nd edition)
Dutch	Het verhaal van onze voorouders	Mark van Nieuwstadt	2007
French	Il était une fois nos ancêtres	Marie-France Desjeux-Lefort	2007
German	Geschichten vom Ursprung des Lebens	Sebastian Vogel	2008
Hungarian	Az Ős meséje – Zarándoklat az élet hajnalához	Kovács Lajos	2006
Italian	Il racconto dell'antenato	L. Serra
Persian	داستان نیاکان
Polish	Opowieść przodka	Sobolewska Agnieszka	2018
Portuguese	A grande história da evolução	2009
Spanish	Historia de nuestros ancestros	2008
Turkish	Ataların hikâyesi	Ahmet Fethi	2015
Serbian	Priče naših predaka	2013
Russian	Рассказ предка	S. I. Dolotovskaya (С. И. Долотовская)	2015

See also

• Evolutionary history of life
• Phylogenetic tree
• Timeline of evolution
  • Timeline of human evolution
• Almost Like a Whale, Steve Jones's update of On the Origin of Species
• Genome, Matt Ridley's exploration of the human genome in 23 chapters, each focusing on a specific gene on a different chromosome
• The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner's account of Peter and Rosemary Grant's study of Darwin's finches

External links

• Video introduction by Richard Dawkins
• Richard Dawkins talks to Ira Flatow on "Science Friday"
• Family and kid's experiential programs based on Ancestors Tale, by Connie Barlow, with video, slides and scripts.
• OneZoom, an interactive fractal explorer of the tree of life, used to make the visualizations in The Ancestor's Tale.