The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins

Review by Jim Walker

The title derives from an allusion to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, where the characters tell tales on their way backward to ancient Canterbury picking up pilgrims along with way at various rendezvous points. Dawkins Canterbury represents the origin of life, the oldest ancestor to our unbroken heritage. The pilgrims in Dawkins story describe our cousins the chimpanzees, gorillas, primates, mammals, animals, etc. The 'beginning' starts with us, the human beings, and the story goes backward in time, following the long branching tree of evolution from the outermost twig, the branches, the trunk, and finally to the root of all life.

Dawkins has a very good reason for describing the evolutionary path backwards rather than forward. Many laymen evolutionists (and religionists) have incorrectly concluded that evolution progresses linearly and has a purpose where we humans act as the target for a 'higher' form of evolution. If one looks at evolution in the direction of forward time, it can lead one to this false sense of progress. Because of Dawkins disavowal of aimed evolution, he chose to do history backwards to avoid this misconception. And it works. Looking at evolution backwards gives us a novel and new appreciation for the diverse and branching aspect of evolution. At each branch point (rendezvous point) we meet our ancestors (Dawkins invents the term concestors). The first rendezvous point, for example, examines our first cousins the chimpanzees, our closest relatives on the DNA chain. This backward way of looking at evolution shows us that humans did not evolve from chimpanzees but rather we evolved out of a shared concestor which gave rise to chimps and humans. A major rendezvous occurs with rendezvous 26 (about 590 million years ago), when all the insects, molluscs, and the worms join. Then we go on to meet the fungi, the plants and eventually the bacteria at some indeterminate time in the ancient past, where all life shares the same ancestor. It takes only 40 rendezvous points to travel back to the beginning of life on earth itself. This appears breathtaking when one considers that all living things trace their lineage back to a single ancestor, a bacterium that lived more than three billion years ago. All life as we know it consists of DNA and all living things, including bacteria, share common genes. (click for full review)

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A Devil's Chaplain - Richard Dawkins

Review by Jim Walker

Reading such intelligent thoughts, put so simply and clearly, and with profound originality, this book can't help but to elevate the reader to some inspired mental plane, unless the reader happens to possess that viral disease called Faith. Anyone who harbors that ugly mental disorder will find themselves vomiting objections to the very thing that just might cure them. Richard Dawkins serves as the doctor who has a cure; a treatment that the infected mind, by its very nature, will at first want to reject. However, if the brave believers can get past their infirmity's power of denial, they will have the inoculative tools to help rid themselves of unnecessary (and dangerous) beliefs.

A Devil's Chaplain, written by one of the most renowned evolutionary biologists, comes from his personal selections from past articles, lectures, book reviews, forewords, tributes and eulogies that he had published over 25 years. A few of you may notice that many of the chapters from Dawkins book had previously appeared on John Catalano's wonderful web site, The World of Richard Dawkins.

No doubt some of the Religious Right will believe that the title of this book describes Dawkins as a disciple of Satan, but actually the phrase comes from a letter by Darwin where he jokingly refers to a book by a Devil's Chaplain explaining the cruel works of nature (an idea that a religious mind who thinks their god has created perfect designs in 'His' image, might want to reconsider after reading this book).

The subjects in this book range from the latest views of evolutionary biology, Darwin, the methodology of science, memes (a lot on memes), ethics, religion (a lot on religion), and heros. Of his heros, Dawkins writes lovingly about the lives of Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame), W. D. Hamilton, John Diamond, Richard Leakey, and Stephen Jay Gould. (click for full review)

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Unweaving The Rainbow - Richard Dawkins

Review by Kendrick Frazier

The central challenge addressed in Richard Dawkins's Unweaving the Rainbow is the perception among many that science somehow diminishes our appreciation of the world. It is a problem all who attempt to explain science to the wider public must sometime face, and noted thinkers like Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, and Martin Gardner all have written about it. In 1995, Dawkins, the noted Oxford zoologist and evolutionist (and CSICOP Fellow), became the first Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford. In this book he faces these wider issues, which go far beyond evolutionary biology but are still enriched and informed by Dawkins's intimate familiarity with that subject. His title is from Keats, who believed that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to its prismatic colors.

Dawkins quickly lays that particular complaint to rest by showing how Newton's optics led to spectroscopy which led to measurement of emission and absorption line spectra and thereby to direct understanding of the nature and characteristics of stars-their size, luminosity, history, and future ("Barcodes of the Stars")-and then to our wider understanding of the cosmos.

"Newton's dissection of the rainbow into light of different wavelengths led onto Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism and thence to Einstein's theory of special relativity," notes Dawkins, adding: "If you think the rainbow has poetic mystery, you should try relativity." All from a little "unweaving of the rainbow." And nothing about it need diminish our astonishment and appreciation of the beauty of a rainbow arcing across the rain-darkened sky. (click for full review)

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The Selfish Gene (30th Anniversary Ed) - Richard Dawkins

Review by Christine Tong
The Selfish Gene presents a brilliant collage of ideas pertaining to biological evolution. Dawkins argues that evolution occurs for the good of the gene (and indirectly the carrier) and not for the good of the species--an idea still contradictory to many social biologists. Specifically, he argues that "the predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness". Much discussion is devoted to unraveling apparent acts of social altruism as fundamental genetic selfishness.

The beauty of this book lies in its simplicity and clarity. Dawkins writes in a non-technical, jargon-free language anyone can understand. The emergence of DNA and genes is explained clearly in terms of probability in molecular survival. His writing style is comprehensible yet gripping. He portrays nature as a savage battleground where genes stop at nothing to survive. Animals, plants, and even ourselves, are merely their disposable "survival machines". Vivid examples of exploitation and violence make natural selection come alive. Think of this book as a hybrid between science fiction and thriller. It is suitable for any student from grade nine and up. Used as a supplementary text or for leisure reading, The Selfish Gene raises some controversial ideas about humanity and our place in the universe. (click for full review)

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The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

Review by PZ Myers

Science writers like Gould, Goodenough, Sagan, or Dawkins often aspire to communicate the wonder they feel at the beauty, complexity, and diversity of nature. It's a natural consequence of a career in science—perhaps even a prerequisite for one—to marvel at stars in the sky or strange creatures of the deep, or even the miracle of our own flesh. Great science writing tries to transmit that same sense of amazement to the reader. In return, all too often these writers are paid the backhanded compliment that they, who do not believe in spirits, are "spiritual;" that the joy they take in the universe is their "religion."

"But is religion the right word?" asks eminent Oxford scholar Richard Dawkins in his newest book, The God Delusion. Though the appropriation of the term may seem innocuous, in Dawkins's view it's part of a larger and more dangerous trend. His reply—"I don't think so"—sets the tone for the book. (click for full review)

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The Extended Phenotype - Richard Dawkins

Review by Deron Stewart

Richard Dawkins has a keen mind and an engaging writing style as is well known. Science has become so large that no one can understand in detail more than a small fraction of any one field. This means that there is a virtue in being able to sift through the barrage of detail for the essential unifying truths about how things are and how they have to be. In a world of splintered specialization the expository talents of Richard Dawkins are deservedly respected. Biological evolution is an intellectual mine field where lack of rigor in making arguments can easily lead to misleading conclusions and Dawkins is not shy about pointing out his colleagues' logical blunders. His own ideas are well thought out and well presented including the Extended Phenotype concept itself.

A more comprehensive Glossary would be useful for non-biologists but for the most part even the difficult passages are comprehensible if an effort is made, and it's well worth the effort. He fears that if it is too easily understood it will not be taken seriously by professional biologists -- he is apologetic about including a Glossary at all. Perhaps if clarity were more revered within academic circles his fear would be unjustified. (Bertrand Russell's reluctant advice to academics was to write in obscure and difficult language in order to get credibility, explaining that the only reason he could get away with writing simple English was that everyone knew he could write things in the arcane language of mathematical logic if he chose.)

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The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins

Review by John Catalano

One of the most famous arguments of the creationist theory of the universe is the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley's: Just as a watch is too complicated and too functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. But as Richard Dawkins, professor of zoology at Oxford University, demonstrates in this brilliant and eloquent riposte to the Argument from Design, the analogy is false. Natural selection, the unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially non-random process that Darwin discovered, has no purpose in mind. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

Patiently and lucidly, Dr. Dawkins - in this book which has been acclaimed as perhaps the most influential work on evolution written in this century - identifies those aspects of the theory which people find hard to believe and removes the barrier to credibility one by one.

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