An Interesting Story
So I went ahead and bought "The Anscestor's Tale" at The Strand while I was in New York. It's by Richard Dawkins, whose "The Blind Watchmaker" changed my brain for good. (I mean that both in the sense of "in a good way" and "permanently") It's loosely structurally based on The Canterbury Tales, in that it's a pilgrimage from one place to another with a continually enlarging group of pilgrims. However, instead of trying to get to Canterbury, we're trying to get to the anscestor of all currently living organisms. So we start by going back to the anscestor of all humans (rendsvous 0) and then meet up with Chimps and Bonobos, great apes, monkeys (old world and new), lemurs, rodents, back back back, birds, back back back, reptiles, back back lungfish, ray-finned fish, bugs, jellyfish, fungus, plants, and all the way back to god knows what it looked like. It's fascinating. I'm all the way to rodents (Rendezvous 10, 75 million years ago), at this point. I can't wait to get to something that isn't a mammal.
An interesting choice that the author made was the backwards telling of the story. I read an interview with him about the book, and he said that he did that because he didn't want to start with something and wind up with humans, thus giving the impression that evolution is directed towards humans, or intelligence, or whatever. Really, that we're an endpoint. That's not the case--we're a successful species that has occurred along the way. He is aware, however, that his book will be read primarily by humans, and thus wanted to focus on our part of the story. The only reasonable thing to do, therefor, is to tell it backwards.
One more thing that I like about it is that, while it's not as theoretically comprehensive as The Blind Watchmaker, it is some 650 pages long, and thus comparable in heft to the Bible. This means that I can really wave it around and thump it if the situation calls for it. I've already given it a few good thumps, just to make sure it makes the right noise. It does.
Oh yeah, I'm sick (I think I was exposed to something in New York for which I didn't have an antibody) so I have all day to read. Who knows what recesses of time I will sound by the time I get to bed.
An interesting choice that the author made was the backwards telling of the story. I read an interview with him about the book, and he said that he did that because he didn't want to start with something and wind up with humans, thus giving the impression that evolution is directed towards humans, or intelligence, or whatever. Really, that we're an endpoint. That's not the case--we're a successful species that has occurred along the way. He is aware, however, that his book will be read primarily by humans, and thus wanted to focus on our part of the story. The only reasonable thing to do, therefor, is to tell it backwards.
One more thing that I like about it is that, while it's not as theoretically comprehensive as The Blind Watchmaker, it is some 650 pages long, and thus comparable in heft to the Bible. This means that I can really wave it around and thump it if the situation calls for it. I've already given it a few good thumps, just to make sure it makes the right noise. It does.
Oh yeah, I'm sick (I think I was exposed to something in New York for which I didn't have an antibody) so I have all day to read. Who knows what recesses of time I will sound by the time I get to bed.