Dawkins’ ancestral tales are not all natural history surveys. Some use particular groups of animals to explain a general principle, such as how new species originate (illustrated by cichlid fish) or how to reconstruct the history of life. The methods that biologists use with living creatures are much the same as those used by literary scholars (or stemmaticists) with copied manuscripts. Although the essay about historical reconstruction is ‘the gibbon’s tale’ it also entertainingly digresses into Chaucerian manuscripts. Other tales recount how the platypus finds its food, electrically, and the 100-million-year immaculate succession of the microscopic virgin-birthers (living in a puddle near you) called bdelloid rotifers (the b is practically silent).

The Ancestor’s Tale differs somewhat from Dawkins’ earlier books. The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker excelled at explaining abstract scientific theories in a way that non-experts can understand. The Ancestor’s Tale is more factual — understanding the history of life is more a matter of getting your facts straight than of understanding difficult ideas. The facts are numerous and protean, and some of them change by the week. In the spirit of reviewer’s one-upmanship, I was on the look-out for some facts that had changed since Dawkins wrote; but I drew a blank. So far as I can tell, the book offers the latest view on the science.

I think of Dawkins as a literary writer, and his previous books have been published to look like works of literature. The Ancestor’s Tale, by contrast, is an illustrated book printed on glossy paper. It is pleasant to browse through as well as to read. Some of the illustrations are recurrent time-diagrams, or maps of the drifting continents; others are photos of live animals or artwork reconstructions of extinct ones.

However, there is still plenty of Dawkins’ poetic prose. There are also good quotations, some from scientists (‘as Robert May, the current President of the Royal Society has said, to a first approximation all species are insects’), others from near-scientists such as Douglas Adams, and others from the likes of Bertrand Russell, Belloc, and Kipling. There are asides on many topics. Dawkins does not much like the current US President, the British Prime Minister, or ‘dotty, Prince Charles-style mysticism’. Longer digressions take us into the errors of the ‘discontinuous mind’ and racial classification, complete with a thorough investigation of Colin Powell’s skin colour. The book is mainly a neo-Chaucerian, post-Darwinian history, with a scope of thousands of millions of years, but it should also inspire, or provoke, its readers into some new thoughts on current affairs

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