puffleg 's review for:

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins, Yan Wong

5.0

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

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Dawkins is Dawkins. If you’re not familiar with his writing style, this probably isn’t the place to start (he does have other books that are great starting points. I’ll point to The Greatest Show on Earth, River out of Eden, and The Magic of Reality). This is because of the dense prose that does require some foundation in evolutionary biology to parse, references to his other works, and because of his voice and opinions. Certainly there are a couple sections where I’d like to offer a rebuttal (the Grasshopper’s Tale comes to mind). 

This book is also on the more concept-driven side. The examples help ground the concepts, but the story here is on Hox genes, asexual reproduction, and where marsupials evolved, among other subjects; it isn’t an organism-focused book.

If you do have that foundation and you like science writing, this is a TREAT. My background is in genomics and there was plenty for me to learn here even within my own field. The structure of the book is brilliant, the topics explored in each tale are fascinating (Howler Monkey’s Tale! Rotifers!), and it has me thinking about the bounds of where our knowledge actually lies (limits of fossil record and molecular clock… I’m going to be wondering about the Cambrian explosion for a while now). I appreciate that he explores several hypotheses for some open questions, and he is transparent about what areas are more speculative than others. Just a blast from start to 800-pages-later, evolution tour de force finish.

For the right kind of person, this is a really special one.