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

by Richard Dawkins

(Santiago volcano day).

The references I find for the last eruption record it as happening over the course of 2 years: 1904-06.

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Students of zoology delude themselves into imagining that when they look at some modern animal, which they call ‘primitive’, they are seeing a remote ancestor. This delusion is betrayed by phrases such as ‘lower animal’, or ‘at the bottom of the evolutionary scale’, which are not only snobbish but evolutionarily incoherent.

All living animals are side branches. No line of evolution is more ‘main’ than any other, except with the conceit of hindsight.

It is theoretically conceivable that a particular fossil really is the direct ancestor of some modern animal. But it is statistically unlikely, because the tree of evolution is not a Christmas tree or a Lombardy poplar, but a densely branched thicket or bush. The fossil you are looking at probably isn’t your ancestor, but it may help you to understand the kind of intermediate stage your real ancestors went through, at least in respect of some particular bit of the body, such as the ear, or the pelvis. A fossil, therefore, has something like the same status as a modern animal. Both can be used to illuminate our guesses about some ancestral stage. Under normal circumstances, neither should be treated as though it really is ancestral. Fossils as well as living creatures are usually best treated as cousins, not ancestors.

penicillin, perhaps the most important fungus of all.

No! Bite your tongue. That honor surely must go to Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Malt has done more than Fleming can To justify fungi’s ways to man.

There is a pair of European grasshopper species, Chorthippus brunneus and C. biguttulus, which are so similar that even expert entomologists can’t tell them apart, yet they never cross-breed in the wild although they sometimes meet. This defines them to be ‘good species’. But experiments have shown that you need only allow a female to hear the mating call of a male of her own species caged nearby and she will happily mate with a male of the wrong species, ‘thinking’, one is tempted to say, that he is the singer. When this happens, healthy and fertile hybrids are produced. It doesn’t normally happen in the wild because a female doesn’t normally find herself near, but unable to reach, a male of her own species at the same time as a male of the wrong species is singing.

What is the song of hybrids like? Who will mate with them?

7088C,

70 degrees C

11588C,

115 degrees C

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100 degrees C

8088C.

80 degrees C

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110 degrees C

One way to underline our current ignorance is to ask, if evolution were to recur from the Precambrian when early eukaryotic cells had already been formed, what organisms in one or two billion years might be like. And, if the experiment were repeated myriads of times, what properties of organisms would arise repeatedly, what properties would be rare, which properties were easy for evolution to happen upon, which were hard? A central failure of our current thinking about evolution is that it has not led us to pose such questions, although the answers might in fact yield deep insight into the expected character of organisms.

My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.