The Ancestor's Tale

This book surprised me in a number of ways. For one, I never thought I could read through a 614-page scientific book at the grueling pace with which I just did. Secondly, I never thought I would read anything by Richard Dawkins and like it. Allow me to back up a bit and explain. My knowledge of Dawkins, both prior to and after reading this book, is that he is a brilliant man and an exemplary biologist with tons of arrogance and elitism regarding his own fervent atheism. South Park satirized him pretty well in a recent two-part episode, essentially mocking his oft-stated (hell, he wrote an enormous book about it just recently) opinion that without religion, humanity would have had so much less violence and so many fewer problems in general than it does today. (The South Park episode's stance, which I agree with, was that humankind will always find something to disagree, argue, fight, or even go to war over, regardless of religion.) I need to tread carefully around the issue of atheism, not because I fear offending anyone (that's right, you four readers - I don't give a shit about your feelings!) but because I myself struggle when it comes to applying a label to myself. Raised Catholic, but having enjoyed a completely modern and secular upbringing, I don't really find myself siding with either "the religious" or "the non-religious" on just about anything. To oversimplify and stereotype, one side is ignorant and blind to the possibility that their beliefs are incorrect, and the other side is arrogant and blind to the possibility that their beliefs are incorrect. In short, it's tough for me, a moderate in nearly every sense of the word, to respect an extremist from either camp. I guess this makes me an agnostic, which only means that neither side can respect me; in the eyes of the religious, I'm too weak to have faith, while in the eyes of the atheists, I'm too weak to denounce religion. And all of this is fine by me. My point, I guess, is that diehard atheists and the diehard religious are far more alike than either side would ever admit, in that both spend far too much time debating, questioning, proving, and disproving an issue that simply can never be proven one way or the other and therefore, in my mind, simply isn't worth the argument. But I digress. A lot. The Ancestor's Tale contained, I was pleasantly surprised to discover, far fewer jabs at religion than I had anticipated in a book by a world-class atheist. Instead, it was a book that dared to attempt to trace the lineage of mankind back to life's origins, "meeting up" with various other organisms (chimpanzees first, then gorillas, and so forth and so on) along the way. The parallels to The Canterbury Tales were numerous and intentional. I was at first relieved, but later disappointed, to find out that this book was not nearly as science-heavy and unreadable as I had expected it to be; while it'd be a chore for anyone with little to no background in biology to get through, I frequently found snippets of information that had been explained to me ad nauseam in various introductory biology courses. Dawkins presented each "rendezvous" along our lineage as a separate chapter. Thus, we had a "Chimpanzee's Tale," a "Gorilla's Tale," a "Peacock's Tale," and a "Redwood's Tale," just to name a few. But instead of these tales being about their titular lifeforms, each was instead about a specific part of evolution; the "Peacock's Tale," for instance, related the general "story" of sexual dimorphism in animalia and its implications on evolution in general. The "Fruit Fly's Tale" is all about evo-devo, the field that studies how genes manage to assemble body sections in the right places in an embryo (preventing us all from having - except when mutations arise - eyes on our legs or fingers coming out of our heads). This was the most brilliant (albeit totally unoriginal) aspect of this giant book; while we humans "journey" back through time, "rendezvousing" with our cousins the apes, and then our more distant cousins the rodents, and so on, we begin to gain a more and more complete picture not only of our evolutionary tree, but also of the evolutionary process as a whole. I credit Dawkins with being able to cram so much scientific information into so entertaining a "journey," and praise this book as one of the greatest nonfiction ones that I have ever read. It did run out of steam a bit toward the end, in my opinion, as Dawkins began to try to extract "where should science go from here?"-type tidbits for the final fifty pages or so instead of letting the mainframe of his work speak for itself. Still, his efforts deserve the recognition they have earned. I'd go into detail about some of the points in the book that I found particularly interesting or cool, but then, in a way, that'd be like posting spoilers. Besides, I've run on for quite a bit now, due in no small part to my largely unnecessary disclaimer about Dawkins' rampant atheism. I guess I'll conclude by saying that while I still don't really appreciate Dawkins the atheist, I have certainly come to respect Dawkins the scientist. And that's something.