The Ancestor\'s Tale by Richard Dawkins (Read by author & wife)

The Ancestor\'s Tale:
A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life
by Richard Dawkins

Narrated by Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward
Program Format: Author Abridged
Codec: 32kbps MP3
Duration: 8 hours : 54 minutes
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group, 2005
Original Source: 7 Audio CDs
ISBN: 0752873210


PLEASE BUY THE BOOK:

Hardcover ISBN: 0297825038
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0297825038/

Paperback ISBN: 0753819961
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0753819961/

Audiobook ISBN: 0752873210
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0752873210/


http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/

Book Description
The Ancestor\'s Tale is a pilgrimage back through time; a journey on which we meet up with fellow pilgrims along the route as we and they converge on our common ancestors. Chimpanzees join us at about 6 million years in the past, gorillas at 7 million years, orang utans at 14 million years, as we stride on together, a growing band. The journey provides the setting for a collection of some 40 tales. Each explores an aspect of evolutionary biology through the stories of characters met along the way or glimpsed from afar - the Elephant Bird\'s Tale, the Marsupial Mole\'s Tale, the Coelacanth\'s Tale. Together they give a deep understanding of the processes that have shaped life on Earth: convergent evolution, the isolation of populations, continental drift, the great extinctions. The tales are interspersed with prologues detailing the journey, route maps showing joining lineages, and life-like reconstructions of our common ancestors. The Ancestor\'s Tale represents a pilgrimage on an unimaginable scale: our goal is four billion years away, and the number of pilgrims joining us grows vast - ultimately encompassing all living creatures. At the end of the journey lies something remarkable in its simplicity and transformative power: the first, humble, replicating molecules.

From Scientific American
In this expansive book, Dawkins, the well-known evolutionary biologist and author (The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, A Devil\'s Chaplain, among others), gives us an eloquent treatise on evolution, ne-glecting neither the latest developments nor his own provocative views. As the title suggests, Chaucer\'s Canterbury Tales provides the model for the book\'s conceit--a pilgrimage back through four billion years of life on earth. We join with other organisms at rendezvous points where we find common ancestors, until we arrive at the \"grand ancestor of all surviving life.\" As Dawkins explains: \"Backward chronology in search of ancestors really can sensibly aim towards a single distant target ... and we can\'t help converging upon it no matter where we start--elephant or eagle, swift or salmonella, wellingtonia or woman.... Instead of treating evolution as aimed toward us, we choose modern Homo sapiens as our arbitrary, but forgivably preferred, starting point for a reverse chronology.... Following Chaucer\'s lead, my pilgrims, which are all the different species of living creatures, will have the opportunity to tell tales along the way to their Canterbury, which is the origin of life. It is these tales that form the main substance of this book.\"

About the Author
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist renowned throughout the world. He was educated at Oxford where he did his doctorate under the nobel-prize winning ethologist Niko Tinbergen. From 1967-1969 he was an Assistant Professor at the University of California at Berkley. Since 1995 he has been Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His books rank among the most influential intellectual works of our time.


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Buy it here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0752873210/