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Richard Dawkins, Bracketted V2.Wps For all the many years that have passed away Matthew Lee Knowles 2010/11 (all the bracketed text extracted from ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’ by Richard Dawkins ) (and that is a myth too) (and in this context it always is man rather than woman) (although it baffles me why anybody regards this as an explanation for anything, given that the problem so swiftly regresses to the larger one of explaining the existence of the equally fine-tuned and improbable premeditator) (last long enough to make black holes, for instance) (though it often is) (the number of surviving species at the time of observation) (in the main a good book, so I shall not name and shame it) (a human species, probably ancestral to us) (boreal means northern) (and no less) (it is a intriguingly unfamiliar thought that there is always one such species) (including humans) (exactly in most cases, almost exactly in the rest) (it didn’t fossilise) (all but one of the other lineages went extinct) (quite a lot deeper into the past, and probably no longer in Africa) (most of) (or women) (or more) (petrified gum from trees) (as they tediously do) (or sixteen) (or hexadecimal) (see the Elephant Bird’s Tale) (especially microfossils) (see plate one) (tree rings) (carbon fourteen) (uranium-thorium-lead) (potassium-argon) (which I can sing) (or blossom, depending upon your taste) (unless, as has been recently suggested, their knotted strings were used for language as well as for counting) (the next copying ‘generation’) (it is the French hard c in comme) (American children call it ‘telephone’) (no doubt sincerely) (with very minor variations in a few rare cases) (whether other genes or repetitive nonsense) (and controversial) (or at least slightly more likely than not) (strictly inherited the genes for growing it) (the family of mouse like rodents is called Muridae, and of squirrel-like rodents Scuridae) (plural genera) (plural phyla) (‘panther’) (‘hunter’ can include fisher) (called ‘bushmen’) (called ‘Indians’ after a navigational error) (who prefer not to be called Eskimos) (the third chimpanzee) (a parasite is less concerned to prolong the life of its present host if it can easily find new victims to infect) (and often overexploit) (and presumably) (his favourites such as chow chows) (and wolves) (which it now seems should be called Simien Wolves) (golden, side-striped and black-backed jackals) (‘propensity to tameness’) (this terminological convention is worth remembering, by the way. An enzyme’s name will often be constructed by adding ‘-ase’ to the first part of the name of the substance on which it works) (and to a lesser extent, their traditional enemies the Hutu) (though, interestingly, not the sedentary branch of Fulani) (my father, as a young man fresh out of college, taught agriculture to peasant farmers in central Africa in the 1940’s, and he tells me that this was one of the hardest lessons to get across) (along with the grasses themselves) (and eventually lawnmowers) (and very recently scientific hybridisation and genetically engineered mutations) (or, in Asia, bamboo) (see plate two) (erectus) (see plate one) (it happens to be a family name) (and necessarily yours, given that you are human enough to be reading this book) (in this case, the entire major group called Afrotheria which we shall meet at Rendezvous thirteen, and which includes elephants and dugongs, hyraxes and Madagascan tenrecs) (shades of Nazi lamps) (base two) (of course they aren’t) (give or take alien abductions in flying saucers) (1890-1962) (1850-1943, Charles’ second youngest son) (Ed. 1983) (vol. 431, p. 562) (MRCAs) (‘locus’) (people) (overleaf) (i.e. haemophilia is ‘recessive’) (males never receive their X chromosome from their father) (females always receive their father’s only X chromosome) (strictly an allele) (though we cannot detect) (most recent common ancestor) (people or organism) (or even, as we shall see, in the same individual) (possibly mutated) (1904-1918) (Victoria) (‘people’) (say for eye colour) (Edward VII’s great-granddaughter) (Charles) (Rupert and Heinrich) (‘locus’) (as we shall see, even members of other species) (fewer when making sperm, more when making eggs; it is not known why) (non-combining portion of the) (although in this case it is not responsible for making the embryo develop as a female; males have mitochondria, it is just that they don’t pass them on) (and other genes) (creationists please refrain from deliberate misquotation) (which upset him and he was later palpably relieved to discover respectable African roots for his mitochondria) (although unfortunately, by wiping out genetic lineages, severe bottlenecks tend to erase the traces of what happened before them) (YOOA) (OOOA) (as with Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA) (as with certain smaller parts of the genome) (Homo erectus) (which everyone accepts and for which the evidence is mostly from fossils) [284] (square brackets refer to sources in the bibliography) (or to ‘your’ chimpanzees) (with a small a) (with a large A) (longer still if we include the Neanderthals, of whom more in a moment) (which used to be called Northern Rhodesia) (where we would be Homo sapiens sapiens) (which is why some authorities classify them as just another type of Archaic) (or only incidentally) (described in Eve’s Tale) (Homo habilis) (us) (900cc in early specimens to 1,100cc in late ones) (or shrink again) (and also, in a different way, in a wholly unrelated individual with the same kind of language defect) (as opposed to ‘exons’ which are ‘expressed’ and therefore ‘seen’ by natural selection) (Homo ergaster) (see page ninety-two) (silicon dioxide) (mostly silicon dioxide, but some of the silicon atoms are replaced by aluminium atoms) (calcium carbonate) (which in turn is molten rock) (for sale to gullible creationists who know, all too well, that ‘There were giants in the earth in those days’: Genesis 6:4) (see plate three) (by the distinguished and eccentric sculptor who procured it for me) (if indeed it is genuine, for it looks pretty nondescript to me) (as well as the usual hard ones) (see plate four) (Australopithecus) (Homo ergaster) (slightly unwillingly in my case but I’ll let it pass) (or smaller) (kidney or shoulder-blade) (from my colleague the distinguished anthropologist Robert Martin) [185] (or equal steps up the side) (and height and depth) (width, etc.) (at least initially) (proportional to volume) (initial) (assumed proportional to area) (mass) (second power of linear size) (third power of linear size) (brain size exactly proportional to body size) (or number of body cells) (well, a brain does look a bit like a cauliflower) (and all reptiles below) (monkeys and apes) (xenarthrans are an order of South American mammals, including sloths, anteaters and armadillos) (the EQ would be larger, if calculated against the standard of the vertebrates as a whole. And it would be smaller if calculated against the standard of primates as a whole) (or less) (Mya; log scale) (see text) (we met them in the graph at the end of the Handyman’s Tale) (or Paranthropus) (or Paranthropus or Zinjanthropus) (or Paranthropus) (gracile being the opposite of robust) (perhaps erroneously as is now suspected) (see below) (page seventy-six) (or ostrich or kangaroo, for that matter) (they were given something to hold on to) (I attribute this inspired way of expressing it to Steven Pinker) (the technical term for this kind of thing is pre-adaption argument is all about) (disconcerting because it seems to leave little time for bipedality to evolve) (as we shall see, many authorities had thought early hominid evolution confined to the east of the rift) (Hope of Life in the local Goran language) (lacking the protruding face of a chimpanzee or a gorilla) (the big hole through which the spinal chord passes) (perhaps rightly) (or some combination from among the four) (often good for a laugh in my experience) (like Lucy) (like ‘Dear Boy’) (very) (you have to eat raw fish guts) (or australopithecines, orrorins or sahelanthropes) (Pan paniscus) (Pan troglodytes) (or ‘phylogeny’) (marked by a numbered circle) (Pan troglodytes) (Pan paniscus) (knuckles) (1871) (a report by a missionary in Liberia in the 1843 issue of the Boston Journal of Natural History) (among others) (‘Toumai’) (genital-genital) (Gorilla) (concestor one is marked on the branch with a dot at six million years ago) (Gorilla gorilla) (wrongly as Huxley showed) (1763) (American ‘checkers’) (1699) (several species of the early ape genus Proconsul) (pongo) (Pongo pygmaeus) (see plate five) (by this criterion, as I have often remarked elsewhere, Darwin’s theory of natural selection may be the best theory of all time) (no migrations) (a first migration) (a second migration) (the most obvious difference between monkeys and apes, as we shall see, is that the monkeys retained their tails) [273] (Dryopithecus, Sivapithecus, etc.) (convergent evolution) (the black and white coding on the diagram) (or ancestor) (and Rendezvous four) (Bunopithecus hoolock) (Hylobates agilis) (Symphalangus syndactylus) (Nomascus gabriellae) (Nomascus) (Symphalangus) (Hylobates) (Bunopithecus) (or at least allows) (from 3900 mya to origin of Earth at 4500 mya sometimes called Hadean) (www.stratigraphy.org) (Mya) (see page fifteen) (see page thirty-six) (see page seventy-six) (see page seventy-seven) (see page 173) (see page 119) (castor fiber) (see page 198) (the other is the pygmy hippo, Hexaprotodon liberiensis) (see page 203) (sirenia) [119] (see page 209) (Mirovriga leonina) (see page 214) (Elephantlus
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