The Ancestor's Tale

[A Person]

I took August off-line in the UK and Europe, ignoring email and cell phones and catching up on some reading. One book I thoroughly enjoyed was The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. It's been out for a while but I had put off reading it because of it's size. However because of it's layout it can be dipped into - indeed I found it best to read a section and then let it digest. It's a collection of tales about common ancestors (concestors) each illustrating a point about evolution science. He tels the story as a 'pilgrim to the past', meeting other groups of pilgrims at rendevous with a concestor, in an analogy with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Dawkins manages to get a lot of science across in a very readable and understandable way. His writing is full of little nuggets of memorable prose:

It is therefore no accident that we see stars in our sky, for stars are a necessary part of any universe capable of generating us. 'This does not imply that stars exist in order to make us. It is just that without stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the periodic table, and a chemistry of only three elements is too impoverished to support life. Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kind of universe where what you see are stars.'

or

For particular genes, you are more closely related to some chimpanzees than to some humans.

e.g. blood groups: you and a chimp might be group O, while your partner might be group A.

Great stuff

[Liv]

That really does sound interesting. One of these days I'll have to take a "real" vacation and read it.

[SouthernFriedInfidel]

I started reading that book once, but lost interest after a while. It struck me as being OK, but a bit tedious...