The Ancestor’s Tale
By Richard Dawkins
Published by Phoenix, 2005 paperback
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

One damn species after another

The Nation
Published on January 8, 2006
The first thing I did after scanning the thicket of glowing cover blurbs on Richard Dawkins’ eighth book (all quite deserved, it unsurprisingly turns out), was flip to the index to see if he had anything to say about creationism, and specifically the “intelligent design” that’s oozing into school curricula in Bush’s America like protozoan goo.
Happily, he does, and equally pleasingly, he doesn’t feel the need to say much. There are four entries between “cow” and “Crockford”, among them “going on about ‘gaps’”, “hopes dashed on improbability of large molecules” and “love of Cambrian Explosion”.
It’s evident from the outset, then, that Dawkins is not merely cynical about this trendy neo-con alternative to Darwinian evolution but downright scornful. Creationists, he says, have “carefully impoverished imaginations”.
So enough of that nonsense. There are 700 pages and four million years to get through.
And what a journey, forward into the past, as it were. It’s heavy slogging at times, the theory sometimes as thick as the primeval forest that must be broached to get to the next “rendezvous”. That’s Dawkins’ choice of word for a convergence of species on the backward trek toward the ultimate family reunion, with “Concestor 39”, living creation’s most distant common ancestor (apart from God, of course).
Progress is comfortable, though, thanks to Dawkins’ decision to outfit readers with the trappings of olde Geoff Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”, and our pilgrimage is guided by a succession of fellow crawlers in the form of the mouse’s, armadillo’s, elephant bird’s, velvet worm’s, flounder’s and cauliflower’s tales, and so on back into the murk and a chap named Taq, the bacterium Thermus aquaticus.
There are loads of surprises along the way for average readers like me. Man’s great shift from hunter-gatherer to farmer didn’t actually make people happier or healthier, for example, since the large populations that resulted were more vulnerable to parasites that see no need to prolong a host’s life if there are plenty of hosts within reach.
Sly foxes can be bred within 20 years to be as pliable as puppies; human language may have appeared quite suddenly; there are so far no fossils of chimpanzees’ direct forebears. And what about this theory that apes may have once been literally upstanding fellows before retrograding into the oafish quadrupeds we know and kid around with today?
Stuff like this pops up on almost every page. Beavers, uniquely, will continue “building dams” even when they’re in a cage with no building materials – they go through the motions like an air guitarist.
You may have heard that a hippo’s closest kin is the whale (whose up and down swimming motion derives from the mammalian gallop), but did you know that T Rex was more closely related to your pet canary than it was to brachiosaurus?
Most people know that ants “herd” and “milk” aphids, but few are aware that some aphids are believed to have evolved a picture of an ant’s face on their bums, the better to lure an ant into becoming its bodyguard in return for a nibble on the “honeydew” that’s excreted there. Or is that too much information?
Be prepared for an information deluge of biblical generosity, but while there are lots of words like “phenotypes”, “cladograms” and heterochrony” to get used to, Dawkins is always an engaging storyteller, a populariser of science in the Carl Sagan sense, without that much-missed astronomer’s tendency to patronise.
“The Ancestor’s Tale” is an immense undertaking (and Dawkins is effuse with references throughout to his fellow researchers and authors), but it still comes as a surprise that halfway through the book you’ve only got as far as the toads that still belch in the Bangkok night. It automatically gives you a sense of the vast sweep of time – and how much of it has preceded us.
Bangkok gets a quick mention by name, incidentally, for one of the fungi sold in its markets as het pluak that grows only on the mounds of termites, which farm it from their wood mulch, though they don’t usually allow it to sprout. Lucky us!
Back on the road, we get wonder-filled dissertations on plate tectonics, a land called Laurasia and an ocean called Tethys and, lo, the immortal coelacanth, and by way of explaining how everything under the sun and hidden in the shade is related, we learn what Colin Powell has to do with grasshoppers.
Perhaps most enjoyable, deep in the forgotten aeons, are the curious beasts we encounter, like the taxolotl, a sort of larval salamander found in a Mexican lake that never “grows up”.
And how about the sea squirt: “A bag filled with sea water, plus a gut and reproductive organs, anchored to a rock.”
Sounds like granddad, all right.

SIDEBAR
Politics and (d)evolution

We humans are still grappling with 9/11, but once upon a time there were the vastly more devastating occurrences surrounding K/T, and discussing them in “The Ancestor’s Tale” gives Richard Dawkins a chance to get political.
The K/T boundary (the letters stand for Cretaceous-Tertiary, with a K rather than C only because C was already being used for the Carboniferous Period) was that evolution-remapping point in history when the dinosaurs were wiped out by a whacking great meteor strike. Dawkins describes the event 65 million years ago like this:
“The noise of the impact, thundering around the planet at a thousand kilometres an hour, probably deafened every living creature not burned by the blast, suffocated by the wind-shock, drowned by the 150-metre tsunami that raced around the literally boiling sea, or pulverised by an earthquake a thousand times more violent than the largest ever dealt by the San Andreas fault.
“And that was just the immediate cataclysm. Then there was the aftermath – the global forest fires, the smoke and dust and ash which blotted out the sun in a two-year nuclear winter that killed off most of the plants and stopped dead the world’s food chains.”
Dawkins goes on to suggest that man ought to be putting more effort into preventing another collision with a not-so-heavenly body, because “the odds that it will happen in some unfortunate individual’s lifetime are near certainty … [although] the unfortunate individuals concerned will probably not be human, for the statistical likelihood is that we shall be extinct before then anyway”.
Phew, Professor! But wait, he’s not done:
“Politicians who invent external threats from foreign powers, in order to scare up economic or voter support for themselves, might find that a potentially colliding meteor answers their ignoble purpose just as well as an Evil Empire, an Axis of Evil, or the more nebulous abstraction ‘Terror’, with the added benefit of encouraging international cooperation rather than divisiveness.”
Lest anyone is wondering what sort of politicians draw the author’s disdain, he later invites George Bush and Tony Blair into a discourse on why our ancestors started walking upright. It was a fad, Dawkins theorises: One individual started getting all the girls because he made the usual practice of standing erect to get food a more or less permanent habit. Everyone else thought it was cool and mimicry launched a new way of life, much the same, the author writes (quoting “several commentators”), as the British prime minister tends to adopt the US president’s cowboy strut whenever they’re together, “arms held out to the sides as though ready to reach for two pistols”. – The Nation