Books by Richard Dawkins: A Devil's Chaplain, Climbing Mount Improbable, River Out of Eden, the Ancestor's Tale, the Blind Watchmaker,...
- ISBN-10
- 1230477284
- ISBN-13
- 9781230477282
- Pages
- 36
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2013-09
- Publisher
- University-Press.org
- Author
- Source Wikipedia
Description
Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Commentary (books not included). Pages: 34. Chapters: A Devil's Chaplain, Climbing Mount Improbable, River Out of Eden, The Ancestor's Tale, The Blind Watchmaker, The Extended Phenotype, The God Delusion, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, The Magic of Reality, The Selfish Gene, Unweaving the Rainbow. Excerpt: The Ancestor's Tale (subtitled A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life) is a 2004 popular science book by Richard Dawkins, with contributions from Dawkins' research assistant Yan Wong. It follows the path of humans backwards through evolutionary history, meeting humanity's cousins as they converge on common ancestors. The book was nominated for the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Cladogram showing relationship between mammalian species as recounted in the bookThe narrative is structured as a pilgrimage, with all modern animals following their own path through history to the origin of life. Humans meet their evolutionary cousins at rendezvous points along the way, the points at which the lineage diverged. At each point Dawkins attempts to infer, from molecular and fossil evidence, the probable form of the most recent common ancestor and describes the modern animals that join humanity's growing travelling party. This structure is inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The pilgrimage visits a total of 40 "rendezvous points" from rendezvous zero, the most recent common ancestor of all of humanity, to rendezvous 39, eubacteria, the ancestor of all surviving organisms. Though Dawkins is confident of the essential shape of this phylogenetic taxonomy, he enters caveats on a small number of branch points where a compelling weight of evidence had not been assembled at the time of writing. At each rendezvous point, Dawkins recounts interesting tales concerning the cousin animals which are about to join the...
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