The Ancestor's Tale : A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life - Hardcover

Dawkins, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297825038 ISBN 13: 9780297825036

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Illus, 2004

Synopsis

The renowned biologist and thinker Richard Dawkins presents his most expansive work a comprehensive look at evolution, ranging from the latest developments in the field to his own provocative views. 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 our planet. As the pilgrimage progresses, we join with other organisms at the forty "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 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 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 life on Earth. Here Dawkins shows us how remarkable we are, how astonishing our history, and how intimate our relationship with the rest of the living world.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist renowned throughout the world. He was educated at Oxford where he did his doctorate under the nobel-prize winning ethologist Niko Tinbergen. From 1967-1969 he was an Assistant Professor at the University of California at Berkley. Since 1995 he has been Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His books rank among the most influential intellectual works of our time.

Review

'fabulous in many ways... lavishly illustrated and brilliantly signposted, with something to amaze on every page, it will be a hard book for non-scientists to put down.' -- John Cornwell THE SUNDAY TIMES 'As a contribution to the history of ideas this book is well worthy of Britain's top public intellectual. The arguements are as sharply honed as we have come to expect from Dawkins.' -- Matt Ridley GUARDIAN 'one of the richest accounts of evolution ever written...the tales of the pilgrims dart around with a delightful unpredictability, propelled like a firecracker by Dawkin's wonderful way with words. He is so good at explaining complex scientific issues that readers will learn painlessly about matters well outside the author's field of evolutionary biology from maths to cosmology...we have no right to expect (another) magnum opus on the scale of THE ANCESTOR'S TALE.' FINANCIAL TIMES 'huge, magisterial and didactic' -- Richard Wentk FOCUS MAGAZINE 'A book which tries, with much brilliance and some success, to treat our vaunted humanity as no more than a tiny episode in a vast drama, equivalent to a couple of seconds of madness at the end of a very long day.' -- Jonathan Ree THE EVENING STANDARD 'As always with Dawkins, the writing is beautiful: economical, vivid and often, both elegant and witty.' -- John Burnside THE SCOTSMAN 'His book, however, should be given to all intelligent young persons starting out on their exploration of the world. It will excite their curiosity and awe and prove to them that the world is inexhaustible in its fascination.' -- Anthony Daniels THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'A new chronicle of life, wonderfully illustrated, from this great evolutionist.' THE ECONOMIST 'THE ANCESTOR'S TALE makes you feel you have seen the world in a fresh, exhilarating way.' -- Robert Hanks THE DAILY TELEGRAPH 'a monumental book.' -- Dick Ahlstrom THE IRISH TIMES 'In this book Dawkins brings together many of the ideas he has put forward elsewhere into a coherent and elegant whole.' -- Crispin Tickell LITERARY REVIEW

Edition details

• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Illus
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0297825038
• ISBN 13: 9780297825036
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 520