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

Loosely based on the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dawkins's Tale takes us modern humans back through four billion years of life on earth. As our pilgrimage progresses, we join with other organisms at the "rendezvous points" where we find a common ancestor. The band of pilgrims swells into a vast crowd as we join first with other primates, then with other mammals, and so on back to the very first primordial organism.

Dawkins's brilliant, inventive approach allows us to view the connections between ourselves and all other life in a bracingly novel way. It also lets him shed bright new light on the most compelling aspects of evolutionary history and theory: sexual selection, speciation, convergent evolution, extinction, genetics, plate tectonics, geographical dispersal, and more.

The Ancestor's Tale is at once a far-reaching survey of the latest, best thinking on biology and a fascinating history of all living things.

the renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has—with

unparalleled wit, clarity, and intelligence—introduced countless readers

to the wonders of modern biology. Now, in The Ancestor"s Tale,

this gifted science popularizer offers a masterwork: a wholly original

tour backward through evolution, from present-day humans all the

way to the origins of life four billion years ago. As humans are joined by

new cousins at pivotal evolutionary points, Dawkins spins entertaining,

enlightening tales, explaining topics such as speciation, sexual selection,

and extinction.

The Ancestor"s Tale is at once a delightful read and a comprehensive

education in evolutionary theory, as How the Mind Works is for

neurology and A Brief History of Time is for astrophysics.