The Ancestor’s Tale

It has been some time since the last substantial book from Richard Dawkins and this book is certainly substantial. It is a pilgrimage to the dawn of life and its model is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. All the tales are told by our "concestors". These are animals and other scraps of life from which we have diverged over the aeons.

Concestors are the last common ancestor that we all share. There will be a concestor for all Mammals and, more recently, a concestor for Old World Monkeys. The oldest concestor is the first living thing - or, more precisely, the first living thing which survived and is the ancestor of all of us.

As Dawkins points out, present day life and, as far as we know, all past life is descended from one concestor. We all use the same genetic code. And something as complicated as that could only be invented once.

Dawkins being the man he is, chooses his Tale-Bearers carefully. And he uses them to give us the latest on a wide variety of topics. The Gibbon’s Tale takes us into the intricacy of cladograms - and he explains it using various versions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. His explanation is the closest I have come to understanding cladistics!

The Redwood’s Tale allows him to discuss age-dating - from tree rings to magnetic reversals to radio-active dating. And all beautifully explained.

And did you know that Mixotricha paradoxa, which lives in the gut of "Darwin’s Termite", is a protozoan covered with a layer of bacteria which help it to swim. These are anchored to the outer surface by other bacteria. So one beastie turns out to be a like a ship with thousands of galley-slaves. All inside a termite!