The Ancestor's Tale
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The Ancestor's Tale (subtitled "A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life") is a 2004 popular science book by Richard Dawkins, with contributions from Dawkins' research assistant Yan Wong. It follows the path of humans backwards through evolutionary history, meeting humanity's cousins as they converge on common ancestors. The book was nominated for the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books.
The narrative is structured as a pilgrimage, with all modern animals following their own path through history to the origin of life. Humans meet their cousins at rendezvous points along the way, the points at which the lineage diverged. At each point Dawkins attempts to infer, from molecular and fossil evidence, the probable form of the ancestor and describes the modern animals that join humanity's growing travelling party. This structure is inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
The pilgrimage visits a total of 40 "rendezvous points" from rendezvous zero, the most recent common ancestor of all of humanity, to rendezvous 39, eubacteria, the ancestor of all surviving organisms. Though Dawkins is confident of the essential shape of this phylogenetic taxonomy, he enters caveats on a small number of branch points where a compelling weight of evidence had not been assembled at the time of writing.
At each rendezvous point, Dawkins recounts interesting tales about cousin animals which are about to join the band of pilgrims. Every newly recruited species, genus or family has its own peculiar features to offer as amusement for readers. And these features are studied and analyzed using a newly introduced tool or method from evolutionary biology, carefully woven into the tale to illustrate how the few simple assumptions of Darwinian evolution can explain all diversity in nature.
Even though the book is best read sequentially, every chapter can also be read independently as a self-contained tale with an emphasis on a particular aspect of modern biology. As a whole, the book elaborates on all major topics in evolution. The Ancestor's Tale can be considered an encyclopedia on evolution disguised as a collection of fascinating stories.
Dawkins also tells personal stories about his childhood and time at university. He too seems just as surprised as the reader when he reveals that the closest relatives to the hippos are the whales, which are buried deep within the hoofed mammals. He also discusses why the axolotl never needs to grow up, how new species come about, how hard it is to classify animals and why our fish-like ancestors decided to move on to land.
The book was produced in two hardback versions: a British one with extensive colour illustrations (by Weidenfeld & Nicolson), and an American one with a reduced number of black-and-white illustrations (by Houghton Mifflin). Paperback versions and an abridged audio version (narrated by Dawkins and his wife Lalla Ward) have also been published.
The book is dedicated to Dawkins' friend and mentor, population geneticist John Maynard Smith, who died shortly before the book went to press.
[edit] List of rendezvous points
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