The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life, by Richard Dawkins. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $79.99.

All life has a common ancestor. Or to put it another way, every creature alive today, including ourselves, has an unbroken chain of ancestors going back almost four billion years. At certain points along the path from then to now, lineages have split, and split again, to give rise to the millions of species alive today.

A problem with descriptions of life’s history is that it’s very easy to give the impression that it all culminates in us, and everything else is “off the main line of evolution”. Dawkins avoids this by doing the history backwards, couching his history in terms of a pilgrimage back through time to meet the common ancestor of all life: an evolutionary Canterbury Tale. As we head back, we meet up with other bands of pilgrims – first the chimps and bonobos, then the gorillas, and so on – the bands join, and we march on together. And as with Chaucer, some of the pilgrims have stories to tell, though Dawkins mercifully decides not to have them do it in the first person. Instead, he takes the opportunity himself to explain, for example, the genetic basis of evolutionary novelty in The Howler Monkey’s Tale, or the occasionally surprising revelations about ancestry disclosed by molecular studies, in The Hippopotamus’ Tale – it turns out the closest living relatives of hippos are whales.

In the hands of a lesser writer, all this could be overwhelming. But Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and several other classics of evolutionary biology, has had plenty of experience of this sort of thing. He has captured brilliantly what Darwin, in the final paragraph of The Origin of Species, called the grandeur of the evolutionary view of life.

A version of this review was originally published in the Waikato Times.

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