Books (Science): The Ancestor's Tale (Preview)

I just picked up a book that's rather thicker than the other ones I've been reading lately: The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life by Richard Dawkins. At about 630 pages before the bibliography and index, it's around twice as long as most of the other books I've talked about here. So I'm going to do a little preview post now, and follow up later when I finish.

One of the images that says "evolution" more than any other to the average person is the much-spoofed drawing of a sequence of species running from fish to humans. This image bothers many scientists because it embraces a long-discredited notion that evolution is directed forward towards something (namely, us), when it is, in fact, purely driven by contingency -- what happens in evolution is completely dependent on the past and the present, with no looking forward.

In The Ancestor's Tale, Dawkins reverses things and runs the sequence back from us through the 40 major branchings that have happened in our family tree, towards the common ancestor to all modern life -- sort of like the recent Guiness commercial that made it's rounds on the Web (though the ad has some major mistakes in the species used). Since one can look back without suggesting predestination, this makes for a less misleading perspective on evolution.

As you might have guessed from the title's form and its reference to a pilgramage, The Ancestor's Tale's structure is based loosely on Chaucer's Cantebury Tales. Dawkins tells the tales of the modern descendants from each of the 40 branch nodes in our evolutionary history (for some nodes, he tells tales for many different descendants), just as the pilgrims in Chaucer's stories told their own.

For those who are curious, the 40 cousins of ours (actually, 39 cousins plus ourselves) whose tales are told are:

0. Humans
   
1. Chimpanzees
   
2. Gorillas
   
3. Orang Utans
   
4. Gibbons
   
5. Old World Monkeys
   
6. New World Monkeys
   
7. Tarsiers
   
8. Lemurs & Bushbabies
   
9. Colugos & Tree Shrews
   
10. Rodents & Rabbits
    
11. Laurasiatheres (hippos, seals, etc)
    
12. Xenarthrans (armadillos, etc)
    
13. Afrotheres
    
14. Marsupials
    
15. Monotremes
    
16. Sauropsids (ancestors to birds)
    
17. Amphibians
    
18. Lungfish
    
19. Coelacanths
    
20. Ray-finned Fish
    
21. Sharks
    
22. Lampreys & Hagfish
    
23. Lancelets
    
24. Sea Squirts
    
25. Ambulacrarians
    
26. Protostomes
    
27. Acoelomorph Flatworms
    
28. Cnidarians (jellyfish)
    
29. Ctenophores
    
30. Placozoans
    
31. Sponges
    
32. Choanoflagellates
    
33. DRIPs
    
34. Fungi
    
35. Amoebozoans
    
36. Plants
    
37. Uncertain
    
38. Archaea
    
39. Eubacteria
    

This list is just from the table of contents, so I don't yet know what "DRIPs" are (other than that they're on page 507) or why #37 is "Uncertain". Those details will have to wait until the next post.