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

by Richard Dawkins

Epilogue to the Velvet Worm’s Tale 27 ACOELOMORPH FLATWORMS 28 CNIDARIANS The Jellyfish’s Tale The Polypifer’s

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A decade after the first edition of this book was published, Yan Wong and I met in the fitting surroundings of the Oxford Museum of Natural History to discuss the possibility of producing a new, tenth anniversary edition. Yan, once my undergraduate pupil, had been employed as my research assistant during the writing of the original edition, before he left for his lecturing position in Leeds and his career as a television presenter. He played an enormously important part in the conception and execution of the first edition, and he was credited as joint author of several of the chapters. During the course of our discussion ten years on, we realised that much new information had come in, especially from the molecular genetics laboratories of the world. Yan undertook the bulk of the revision and I proposed to the publisher that this time he should be properly credited as joint author of the whole book. The new research, fortunately, has not greatly changed the order of rendezvous points where pilgrims join the great trek to the origin of life which, following our Chaucerian conceit, we call Canterbury. One or two minor reversals will be discovered herein, along with a couple of additional rendezvous points and some changes of dating. In the first edition we took care to point out that different genes can be inherited through different routes. This has unexpected ramifications which are more fully explored in some new and altered tales for this edition. In particular, we provid...

though not necessarily for the human inhabitants, one of the main places where it flourishes is the town of Darwin in northern Australia. Termites bestride the tropics like a distributed colossus. In tropical savannahs and forests, they reach population densities of 10,000 per square metre, and are estimated to consume up to a third of the total annual production of dead wood, leaves and grass. Their biomass per unit area is double that of migrating herds of wildebeest on the Serengeti and Masai Mara, but is spread across the entire tropics. If you ask the source of the termites’ alarming success, it is twofold. First, they can eat wood, which includes cellulose, lignin and other matter that animal guts normally can’t digest. I’ll return to this. Second, they are highly social and gain great economies from division of labour among specialists. A termite mound has many of the attributes of a single large and voracious organism, with its own anatomy, its own physiology and its own mud-fashioned organs, including an ingenious ventilation and cooling system. The mound itself stays in one place, but it has a myriad mouths and six myriad legs, and these range over a foraging area the size of a football pitch. Termites’ legendary feats of co-operation are possible, in a Darwinian world, only because the majority of individuals are sterile but closely related to a minority who are very fertile indeed. Sterile workers act like parents towards their younger siblings, thereby freeing...