Book Review: The Ancestor's Tale

Author: Richard Dawkins
Spiritual Bias: Atheist
Origins Bias: Evolutionist
Rating: Middle of the Road
Level: Mildly Technical
Year: 2004

Comments: Dawkins is the ultimate evolutionist. So if you want to understand the official modern day evolution story, he is a good author to read. In this 600+ page book there are 39 tales (or stories) from selected points in the hypothetical tree of life which serve to expound upon an evolutionary lesson. Some of the tales represent factual biology, but there is also quite a bit of conjecture, especially when it comes to the discussion of major transitions.

For someone like myself who is very involved in the origins debate, there were no real surprises in this book. Of course, Dawkins did irritate me at times with his snide remarks about Creationism, Intelligent Design, and even President Bush. But they were a minor part of the reading experience. Anyhow, this book is well-written and if you want to understand the present collective body of evidence for evolution you should read this book. Otherwise, leave it alone.

From a broader perspective, at this point in the origins debate we really need evolutionists to step up to the plate and write a detailed book about the evolution of the ten most complex facets of biology. I'm really getting tired of books like this one where the author continues to postulate high level speculations about how a particular feature was gained or lost. If the evidence for evolution is so overwhelming (as many of them claim), they should have no trouble explaining some of the complexity that we are finding inside the cell. But no, we continue to get books like this one, that documents examples of micro-evolution and contains speculation about macro-evolution.


Sample Quote(s): "Perfectionism is a vice of evolutionists. We are so used to the wonders of Darwinian adaptation, it is tempting to believe there could be nothing better. Actually, it is a temptation that I can almost recommend. A surprisingly strong case can be built for evolutionary perfection, but it must be done with circumspection and sophisticated attention." p. 348

"If modern zoology admits of anything approaching a full-blown origin myth, it is the Cambrian Explosion... Creationists love the Cambrian Explosion because it seems, to their carefully impoverished imaginations, to conjure a sort of palaeontological orphanage inhabited by parent phyla: animals with antecedents, as if they had suddenly materialised overnight from nothing, complete with holes in their socks. At the other extreme, romantically overheated zoologists love the Cambrian Explosion for its aura of Arcadian Dreamtime, a zoological age of innocence in which life danced to a frenzied and radically different evolutionary tempo: a prelapsarian bacchanalia of leaping improvision before a fall into the earnest utilitarianism that has prevailed since." p. 436