The Ancestor's Tale
A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

On Monday, an old friend came round to lunch, and, while we were having a cup of tea in the living room, remarked on the number of Richard Dawkins books on my shelf. Somehow, I'd never heard that she'd actually had Dawkins as a supervisor for one term when she was an undergraduate at Oxford in the l......more

Poor Dawkins - he gets a bad reputation. People think he's mean and nasty and heartless and elitist. Okay, I might have to grant people the "elitist" bit, because, well, I'm a bit of an elitist myself. But I dare you all to read this book and then tell me that Dawkins isn't a total squishy. Let's ju......more

This is the 2016, revised edition of this fabulous book. In this edition, Richard Dawkins is a co-author with Yan Wong. This is a very hefty tome, just under 800 pages. It is a marvelously inventive, masterful look at evolution, as seen from the point of view of homo sapiens travelling backwards in......more

Fascinating zoology but plenty of flotsam. "The Beaver's Tale" "The Duckbill's Tale" and "The Axolotl's Tale" are outstanding examples of modern naturalism. The classical genetics is adequate but the molecular data is explained minimally and not compelling. More details on the challenges and uncerta......more

Unlike most books on evolution that start at some arbitrary event in prehistory and then proceed toward the present, Dawkins reverse engineers our genetic building blocks from the present day back to the origin of life. Along the way he stops to elaborate on what he calls “genetic rendezvous”—notewo......more