The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

by Richard Dawkins

In fact, about 80 per cent of individuals in any generation will in theory be ancestors of everybody alive in the distant future.

our genes are more like the dictionary of words available for writing the book of instructions

what distinguishes a mouse from a man is mostly not the genes themselves, nor the order in which they are stored in the chromosomal ‘phrase-book’, but the order in which they are turned on: the equivalent of Dickens or Salinger choosing words from the vocabulary of English and arranging them in sentences.

Hippos’ closest living relatives are whales.

Whales are wonders of the world. They include the largest organisms that have ever moved. They swim with up-and-down movements of the spine derived from the mammalian gallop, as opposed to the side to side wave motion of the spine of a swimming fish or a running lizard.

The only evolutionarily stable sex ratio is 50/50.

Everyone got one mother and one father.

Species in which the sexes are the same size tend, with some exceptions such as horses, not to have harems. Species in which males are markedly bigger than females tend to have harems, or to practise some other form of polygyny.

Polyandry (females mated to more than one male) is rare.