I just posted a review of Richard Dawkins’ “The Ancestor’s Tale” to Amazon.com. I’m reproducing it here:
Dawkins has written more important books: “The Blind Watchmaker” and “The Selfish Gene” were essential reading for all. He’s written more academic books: “The Extended Phenotype” dots all the i’s and crosses every t. And he’s written more impassioned books: “A Devil’s Chaplain” contains wonderful, heartfelt essays.
But for me “The Ancestor’s Tale” beats them all. People joke about “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things”, but Dawkins shows how much we know about the truth of this. The scope is breath-taking – in time, in detail, and in the range of perspectives that he invites us to share. I read this book during a week-long business trip, and Dawkins’ device of a pilgrimage seemed particularly apt: I savoured every moment, and finished it just as I arrived home.
One of the most important stories in the book is “The Salamander’s Tale”, in which Dawkins considers what he calls “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind”. He starts out with the familiar account of “ring species” such as gulls and salamanders, and arrives, with Mayr, at the judgement that it took us so long to arrive at the idea of evolution because of Platonic essentialism. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ESSENCE. Dawkins doesn’t directly assert what seems obvious to me – that religious opposition to evolution arises from essentialism – but he makes clear just how destructively essentialism continues to bedevil science. And when I concluded that story, I was almost startled to realize that it comes less than half way through the book, at rendezvous 17 out of 39. After amphibians we still have to meet fishes, worms, cnidarians, fungi, plants, and so on, leading up to the Great Rendezvous and thence to Canterbury – the first replicator.
At the end, I found myself in awe of how much we humans know, how much we’ve discovered about life, how rich and multifaceted that knowledge is, and how much more there is to learn. “The Ancestor’s Tale” is without doubt the best book I’ve read in 2005; I expect that it’ll be one of those few books that I return to again and again.
[And thanks, Tom, for lending me your copy. I will have to buy my own, of course.]