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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Ancestor's Tale | 2/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancestor's_Tale | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:29:54.233690+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Reception == Carl Zimmer of the New York Times wrote that it is one of the best books to understand evolutionary trees. Rob Colwell of the Wall Street Journal called it "a fittingly superior beast -- lavishly produced and, weighing in at 1.6 kilograms, substantially heavier than the fully-evolved human brain that thought it up." Clive Cookson of the Financial Times called it "one of the richest accounts of evolution ever written. It is also an object lesson in the way thorough picture research, carefully commissioned illustrations and good design can enhance even the best text." He adds "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. But he interlaces the hard science with 'pleasing speculations', humorous asides, personal anecdotes and even political observations." He concludes "we have no right to expect a second magnum opus on the scale of The Ancestor's Tale."
Marek Kohn wrote "The success of this book comes from having one truly Chaucerian character: the author himself." Robin McKie in The Guardian thought it awkward to move backward in time starting from humans and thought this required linguistic gymnastics. Matt Ridley, in the same publication, appreciated the approach of a Chaucerian Pilgrim traveling backwards and the perspective of not seeing other animals as failures. Jody Hey notes that Dawkins "writes engagingly on evolutionary topics. With a highly self-assured style, he effortlessly draws insightful connections among disparate notions, trapping the curiosity of readers before they know what's coming." However, he says "An unfortunate editorial oversight is seen in the text's occasional straying into political commentary. Worse still, Dawkins at one point chastises Richard Lewontin, the great population geneticist, for sometimes interjecting politics into scientific discourse. This little touch of hypocrisy is hard to miss if you read the entire volume. But such lapses amount to a few dozen words in a weighty, truly wonderful book." Steve Jones calls it "a rigorous and impressively complete account of the Tree of Life… The Ancestor's Tale achieves the almost impossible: it makes biology (not biochemistry, brain science, or bird-watching, but biology as a whole) interesting again. Everyone possessed of a cell nucleus should read it, and ponder their own unimportance. One mystery remains: what did the star-nosed mole say to the duck-billed platypus?"
== Translations ==
The Ancestor's Tale has been translated into languages including
Dutch,
French,
German,
Italian,
Portuguese,
Spanish,
Russian,
and Turkish.
== See also == Evolutionary history of life Phylogenetic tree Timeline of evolution Timeline of human evolution Almost Like a Whale, Steve Jones's update of On the Origin of Species Genome, Matt Ridley's exploration of the human genome in 23 chapters, each focusing on a specific gene on a different chromosome The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner's account of Peter and Rosemary Grant's study of Darwin's finches
== Notes ==
== References ==
== External links == Video introduction by Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins talks to Ira Flatow on "Science Friday" Family and kid's experiential programs based on Ancestors Tale, by Connie Barlow, with video, slides and scripts. OneZoom, an interactive fractal explorer of the tree of life, used to make the visualizations in The Ancestor's Tale.