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

by Richard Dawkins

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...