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

by Richard Dawkins

There would never be a generation in which it made sense to say of an individual that he is Homo sapiens but his parents are Homo ergaster. You can think of it as a paradox if you like, but there is no reason to think that any child was ever a member of a different species from its parents, even though the daisy chain of parents and children stretches back from humans to fish and beyond. Actually it isn’t paradoxical to anybody but a dyed-in-the-wool essentialist. It is no more paradoxical than the statement that there is never a moment when a growing child ceases to be short and becomes tall. Or a kettle ceases to be cold and becomes hot. The legal mind may find it necessary to impose a barrier between childhood and majority—the stroke of midnight on the eighteenth birthday, or whenever it is. But anyone can see that it is a (necessary for some purposes) fiction. If only more people could see that the same applies to when, say, a developing embryo becomes ‘human’.