“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing”
-Salvador Dali
Whether or not we believe it, in most everything, science included, we build off of each other’s accomplishments and work; we are all influenced by one another. Through other’s life-long devotions to specific subjects, ideas, or perhaps theories and concepts, future people have the opportunity to further that work posthumously. This idea is somewhat synonymous with the concept of evolution, except instead of building off of theories and ideas, organisms build off of one another‘s genes and memes. Historically first seen in the writings of Hales, Empedocles, Anaximander, and Aristotle but only later established though the idea of natural selection founded by Charles Darwin, evolution has become the staple that holds a biologists’ world view together. Richard Dawkins takes an idea that is absolutely essential to understanding the biological world around us, and expands to an amount only trumped by the vast universe (well maybe not THAT much but quite a bit), creating for his audience an encyclopedia on the topic of evolution. Building off his colleagues, past experts such as Darwin, and even literary geniuses such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Richard Dawkins weaves in and out of the biological world as we see it today as well as how it was in its’ antiquity. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury tales provides the backbone for Dawkins’ extremely readable evolutionary library entitled The Ancestor’s Tale. The story of evolution is brought to life in a way reminiscent of a director’s expose on the life of a character through his history and family, only in this case the character is Life. Dawkins acts as our guide on this journey to the beginning of time and describes for us biological development through common ancestors.
An avid critic of creationism and the cleverly disguised intelligent design, Richard Dawkins is a devout atheist and proponent of evolution. Dawkins is currently Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford and one of the most important and prominent biologists living today. His first published work, The Selfish Gene (which builds upon the principal theory of George C. Williams' first book Adaptation and Natural Selection), revolutionized the way we think about genes and cultural transmission. Now almost 40 years after the publication of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins again surprises the world with this wonderful piece of biological splendor that aids in Darwin's battle for evolution through natural selection.
A pilgrimage to the dawn of evolution is the subtitle to Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale. A pilgrimages is most usually a journey to a sacred place of importance to a person’s faith; faith is belief in something without fact; now, science is a culmination of facts through observation and experimentation through testing. So when Dawkins, a devout atheist and zoologist, states this book to be a pilgrimage, what does he mean? The pilgrimage Dawkins leads us unto is to the beginning of time where the first organism decided to change things up a bit and become two separate organisms, evolving or adapting to better fit a given environment. This sacred place Dawkins’ journey leads to is the place of knowledge and understanding. The book is a backwards motion through time describing how many different organisms may have evolved to their present day state, at the same time introducing vital concepts behind the evolution. The Ancestor’s Tale proves to be capable of not only supplementing, but substituting for an evolutionary textbook (and a lot more fun to read I might add).
Reading much like Chaucer’s literary masterpiece Canterbury Tales, only in academic biology form, The Ancestor’s Tale is Dawkins’ mechanism to delve into evolution in its present understanding and form. Chaucer tells tales of pilgrims on a pilgrimage from Southwark to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral; Dawkins tells tales of different organisms in their current form and history relative to other organisms and eventually their historical evolution. Where Chaucer uses Fragments to separate his chapters, Dawkins uses Rendezvous points to join the previous to the next “cousin“. The path follows evolution backwards until the eventual meeting of a common ancestor, in the final chapter fittingly titled Canterbury, to all current organisms. The book is dissected into major rendezvous points and then further sectioned into tales of individual species also including epilogues and prologues where they seem best fit, much like Chaucer in his Tales. Each rendezvous has a heading of a major class or family and the tales under them associate a given species, with the first rendezvous, 0, dealing with humans. The initial rendezvous starts the Ancestors tale at the present day from the agricultural revolution to where “we set off on our pilgrimage to the past”(26). Dawkins proceeds to progress to more primitive humans/hominids eventually ending the human rendezvous. Each “Tale” alludes to the larger Ancestor's Tale.
Dawkins is able to speak to his audience without overcompensation or condescending tone. Every example he alludes to includes a footnote detailing the off-article note. Wonderful analogies are strewn across the pages, one such example comes from the prologue to The Galapagos Finches’ Tale: cork in the middle of the ocean moving very slowly back and forth, appearing to be moving both east and equally west, however it eventually ends up in an easterly destination. “You won‘t notice any eastward bias unless you sample its position over much longer periods. Yet the eastward bias is real, it is there, and it too deserves an explanation“ (259); evolution is this explanation and the cork is a population of species. Illustrations aid in understanding the ideas presented to the reader as well as an illustrated phylogenetic tree at the beginning of every chapter. In The Elephant Bird’s Tale Dawkins provides us with a few such illustrations/diagrams. When introduced to the ratites’ expansion throughout the world, Gondwanaland is described and subsequently diagramed on the following pages (283). Dawkins also adds in some geological flare, through illustration in the epilogue to the Elephant Bird’s Tale, to explain the theory of plate tectonics. Dawkins creates a comprehensive scope taking the large area of evolution and situating it atop 39 Rendezvous points. He writes in such a way that to find a flaw seems utterly impossible; his attention to detail and explanation are so precise. He stays faithful to his religious faithlessness and tries very hard to steer clear from supernatural rationalization; everything is fact based and science related, but still able to capture, and hold, even the layman's attention.
The Ancestor's Tale brings forth individual tales dealing with individual organisms that often times strike the reader in such a profound manner as to suppose something never predicted. In The Hippo's tale, Dawkins explains the evolutionary history of the Hippopotamus and its relation to whales. The result of this tale is astounding and even caught Dawkins off guard when HE first heard of this. “I have now learned something so shocking that I am still reluctant to believe it, but it looks as though I am going to have to. Hippos’ closest living relatives are whales.”(196). It has become apparent, though phylogenetic studies, that hippos are more closely related to whales than to other ungulates, meaning they share a closer common ancestor than previously thought. Whales are deeply embedded within the even-toed ungulates; hippos are closer cousins to whales than to any other animal. It is interesting to see Dawkins' inclusion of Darwin's speculation of how whales evolved, from his Origin of Species. Darwin believed that whales evolved from the black bear, which doesn't seem so far fetched, after all the truth seems to be much further from itself anyway. Dawkins feels that the hippos leaving land and entering the oceans to become wholly aquatic, “was a bit like going into outer space.”(201)
Other tales explain ancestry in other means, for example The Howler Monkey's tale explains the evolution of color vision in mammals. Current mammals’ first ancestors were little nocturnal beings that had huge eyes and no need for color vision; how and why then did other mammals evolve the ability to see in color? Chromosome translocation and polymorphism can account for these novel traits, but what can account for their need to stay? They became an adaptive trait that was beneficial to the possessor.
While all of the tales are interesting and enlightening, the more interesting ones are those dealing with humans. In the Peacock's Tale, Dawkins tackles the question, why did Humans evolve differently than other primates? He suggests that traits, such as bipedalism, were novel traits that may have been nothing more than fashionable, “A fashion for walking bipedally arose, and it arose as suddenly and capriciously as fashions do. It was a gimmick.”(268). Dawkins then goes on to explain it in relation to a song he remembers when he was a teenager, adding some nostalgic humor to his masterful work:
Everybody’s talking
‘Bout a new way of walking! (269)
He then continues to explain reasons for other novel traits arising in the human population; hairlessness may have been a nice way of telling your potential mate that you were free of any parasite; intellectual capacity was just being able to show your mate you could speak, draw, play music, etc. Just these few traits could have set us apart from other primates merely to impress our lady friends. Sexual selection is also spoken of in The Seal's Tale, which helps to explain the idea of sexual dimorphism. In sexually reproducing organism, males and females will look dissimilar in some respect (206). The reasons for this have to do with competition, sexual selection, and asymmetries in sexual reproduction. “Can the Seal’s tale tell us something about our (humans) natural breeding systems…?” asks Dawkins (207). The result is explained with the help of Dawkins’ colleagues to finish up the Seal’s Tale. An interesting find is made with sexually dimorphic species, those who differ greatly are those “…in polygynous species, especially those with a harem-style society.” (Dawkins) , could this mean our ancestors were polygynous? Dawkins leaves us to this possible conclusion and “hastens” on to the next rendezvous,
The book closes on the dawn of evolution, describing a beginning that consisted of the first organism to copy itself, RNA. The culmination of all the data shown prior to this point is to merely show where it all began. He even includes the Miller-Urey experiment which simulated the beginning of time and created the building blocks necessary to create RNA and DNA. Through this wonderful journey of understanding evolution, we are reminded of how it all may have started. Richard Dawkins' extensive read, The Ancestor's Tale is a must read for any student or teacher of biology, any proponent of creationism, and essentially any person who can read. All the tales in The Ancestor's Tale are worthy of a look, and all help to solidify the previous and future work to be done in evolutionary biology. By learning about the evolutionary past we can better understand our own past and our futures.
