The Ancestor's Tale (Richard Dawkins, 2005)

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ISBN 0-7538-1996-1

A favourite early part of the book, for me, is Eve's Tale. (Bernard Beckett's book, Falling for Science, has some good Eve material, on pp. 163-166, as well.) This section deals with 'mitochondrial Eve' which, although a rather simple concept, is sufficiently unfamiliar to the lay public that various cynical popularisers have been able to parley it into a small industry in its own right. Moreover, in some quarters, and for reasons utterly incomprehensible to me, the topic has engendered a passion verging upon the hysterical. (If you can stomach the arrogance, just take a look at the article by Rebecca Cann and Allan Wilson in Scientific American, New Look at Human Evolution Special Edition, pp. 54-61, for an astonishing example.) Dawkins's exposition, however, is wonderfully clear-sighted and dispassionate. I'll quote a bit of it:

Eve is a great temptress to error and it is good to be forearmed. The errors are quite instructive. First, it is important to understand that [a Y-chromosome "Adam"] and Eve are only two out of a multitude of [most recent common ancestors] MRCAs that we could reach if we traced our way back through different lines. They are the special-case common ancestors that we reach if we travel up the family tree from mother to mother to mother, or father to father to father respectively. But there are many,many other ways of going up the family tree: mother to father to father to mother, mother to mother to father to father, and so forth. Each of these possible pathways will have a different MRCA.

Second, Eve and Adam were not a couple. It would be a major coincidence if they ever met, and they could well have been separated by tens of thousands of years.

— Ancestor's Tale, p. 49

[T]here was nothing to single out either [most recent common ancestors on the female and male lines] for particular notice in their own times. Despite their legendary namesakes, Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam were not particularly lonely. Both would have had plenty of companions, and each may well have had many sexual partners, with whom they may also have surviving descendants. The only thing that singles them out is that Adam eventually turned out to be hugely endowed with descendants down the male line, and Eve with descendants down the female line. Others among their contemporaries may have left as many descendants all told.

— Ancestor's Tale, p. 50

Excellent stuff, I'm thinking. Don't buy any more Eve books; this handful of pages is all you need, and you'll get a free and erudite discussion of the out of Africa nonsense thrown in as well.

The 'Out of Africa' theory holds that all surviving peoples outside Africa are descended from a single exodus around a hundred thousand years ago, more or less. At the other extreme are the 'Separate Origins' theorists or 'Multiregionalists', who believe that the races still living in, say, Asia, Australia and Europe are anciently divided, separately descended from regional populations of the earlier species, Homo erectus. Both names are misleading. 'Out of Africa' is unfortunate because everybody agrees that our ancestors are from Africa if you go back far enough. 'Separate Origins' is also not an ideal name because, again if you go back far enough, the separation must disappear on any theory. The disagreement concerns the date when we came out of Africa. It might be better to call the two theories 'Young Out of Africa' (YOOA) and 'Old Out of Africa' (OOOA). This has the added advantage of emphasising the continuum between them.

— Ancestor's Tale, p. 51

So, here I was, cruising through some vintage Dawkins, really enjoying myself, when out of left field I stumble over an anti-Bush diatribe. What the hell is that doing in here? Then, a few pages farther on, more political rhetoric. Then some thinly veiled barbs aimed at Microsoft Windows. And it's not even worth reading! (It's the usual wide-eyed sophistry you'll find in any university staff room or student cafeteria.) Anyhow, it doesn't matter to the book review whether or not Dawkins's political views agree with mine, or yours; what does matter is that Dawkins is shoving them down our throats under false pretences. When I bought A Devil's Chaplain, I was buying a book of polemics, and I knew it (and liked it, and recommend it...). With The Ancestor's Tale, I believed I was buying a book about evolution and paleontology. No Richard, I really don't give a damn what you think about Microsoft or George Bush, and frankly I'd have thought that mocking his pronounciation was beneath even a pompous Pommy academic.

But it's not only the spurious opinionation which raised my eyebrows. As we approach the end of the Cretaceous, all sorts of bolide impact over-statement begins to emerge, including the suggestion that "an even bigger one" was responsible for the mass extinction event at the end of the Permian. Really? Well, Dawkins certainly has an eminence which would put him on the unofficial rumour mill - he would certainly hear about exciting new research ahead of the rest of us - so possibly he knows something that we don't. It seems unlikely that there is any new conclusive evidence for such a thing, though. Another possibility, which I don't want to believe, is that Dawkins has simply wandered past the hubris threshold, and is now passing off his every casual speculation as if it were solid evidence. To my mind, this is the worst sin a scientist can commit.

Erwin Chargaff was a man with some nasty ideas, but he was right when he noted, "Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman."

Damn. And I wanted to like it, too.

Recommendation: Excellent in parts but, on the whole, not recommended. Hedges & Kumar have done a better job, albeit for a more technical audience.

Look and Feel: My review copy is a hardback with good photographs and index.

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The Ancestor's Tale (Richard Dawkins, 2005)

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