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

About this book

The renowned biologist and thinker Richard Dawkins presents his most expansive work a comprehensive look at evolution ranging from the latest developments in the field to his own provocative views. Loosely based on the form of Chaucers Canterbury Tales Dawkinss Tale takes us modern humans back through four billion years of life on our planet. As the pilgrimage progresses we join with other organisms at the forty "rendezvous points" where we find a common ancestor. The band of pilgrims swells into a vast crowd as we join first with other primates then with other mammals and so on back to the first primordial organism.Dawkinss brilliant inventive approach allows us to view the connections between ourselves and all other life in a bracingly novel way. It also lets him shed bright new light on the most compelling aspects of evolutionary history and sexual selection speciation convergent evolution extinction genetics plate tectonics geographical dispersal and more. The Ancestors Tale is at once a far-reaching survey of the latest best thinking on biology and a fascinating history of life on Earth. Here Dawkins shows us how remarkable we are how astonishing our history and how intimate our relationship with the rest of the living world.