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

by Richard Dawkins

History has been described as one damn thing after another.

Humans and bacteria have DNA sequences which are so similar that whole paragraphs are word-for-word identical.

In the brain, my candidates for the kind of thing I meant by a software innovation were language, spoor-tracking, throwing, and memes.

Or, putting it another way, we are like chimpanzees who have never grown up.

In a classic experiment by Vilém Laufberger in Germany, hormone injections persuaded an axolotl to grow into a fully adult salamander of a species that nobody had ever seen.

Gribbin and Cherfas are in effect suggesting that modern chimpanzees and gorillas are like the Earl of Gonister. They are humans (or australopithecines, orrorins or sahelanthropes) who have grown up and become quadrupedal apes again, like their, and our, more distant ancestors.

Racism and speciesism, and our perennial confusion over how inclusively we wish to cast our moral and ethical net, are brought into sharp and sometimes uncomfortable focus in the history of our attitudes to our fellow humans, and our attitudes to apes—our fellow apes.