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THE ANCESTOR'S TALE By the same author: The Selfish Gene The Extended Phenotype The Blind Watchmaker River Out of Eden Climbing Mount Improbable Unweaving the Rainbow A Devil's Chaplain THE ANCESTOR'S TALE A PILGRIMAGE TO THE DAWN OF LIFE RICHARD DAWKINS with additional research by YAN WONG WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON John Maynard Smith (1920-2004) He saw a draft and graciously accepted the dedication, which now, sadly, must become In Memoriam 'Never mind the lectures or the "workshops"; be Mowed to the motor coach excursions to local beauty spots; forget your fancy visual aids and radio microphones; the only thing that really matters at a conference is that John Maynard Smith must be in residence and there must be a spacious, convivial bar. If he can't manage the dates you have in mind, you must just reschedule the conference.. .He will charm and amuse the young research workers, listen to their stories, inspire them, rekindle enthusiasms that might be flagging, and send them back to their laboratories or their muddy fields, enlivened and invigorated, eager to try out the new ideas he has generously shared with them.' It isn't only conferences that will never be the same again. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I was persuaded to write this book by Anthony Cheetham, founder of Orion Books. The fact that he had moved on before the book was published reflects my unconscionable delay in finishing it. Michael Dover tolerated that delay with humour and fortitude, and always encouraged me by his swift and intelligent understanding of what I was trying to do. The best of his many good decisions was to engage Latha Menon as a freelance editor. As with A Devil's Chaplain, Latha's support has been beyond all estimation. Her grasp of the big picture simultaneously with the details, her encyclopaedic knowledge, her love of science and her selfless devotion to promoting it have benefited me, and this book, in more ways than I can count. Others at the publishers helped greatly, but Jennie Condell and the designer, Ken Wilson, went beyond the call of duty. My research assistant Yan Wong has been intimately involved at every stage of the planning, researching and writing of the book. His resourcefulness and detailed familiarity with modern biology have been matched only by his green fingers with computers. If, here, I have gratefully assumed the role of apprentice, it could be said that he was my apprentice before I was his, for I was his tutor at New College. He then did his doctorate under the supervision of Alan Grafen, once my own graduate student, so I suppose Yan could be called my grandstudent as well as my student. Apprentice or master, Yan's contribution has been so great that, for certain tales, I have insisted on adding his name as joint author. When Yan left to cycle across Patagonia, the book in its final stages benefited greatly from Sam Turvey's extraordinary knowledge of zoology and his conscientious care in deploying it. Advice and help of various kinds were willingly given by Michael Yudkin, Mark Griffith, Steve Simpson, Angela Douglas, George McGavin, Jack Pettigrew, George Barlow, Colin Blakemore, John Mollon, Henry Bennet-Clark, Robin Elisabeth Cornwell, Lindell Bromham, Mark Sutton, Bethia Thomas, Eliza Howlett, Tom Kemp, Malgosia Nowak-Kemp, Richard Fortey, Derek Siveter, Alex Freeman, Nicky Warren, A. V. Grimstone, Alan Cooper, and especially Christine DeBlase-Ballstadt. Others are acknowledged in the Notes at the end. I am deeply grateful to Mark Ridley and Peter Holland, who were engaged by the publishers as critical readers and gave me exactly the right kind of advice. The routine authorial claim of responsibility for the remaining shortcomings is more than usually necessary in my case. As always, I gratefully acknowledge the imaginative generosity of Charles Simonyi. And my wife, Lalla Ward, has once again been my help and strength. RICHARD DAWKINS CONTENTS THE CONCEIT OF HINDSIGHT S THE GENERAL PROLOGUE 16 THE PILGRIMAGE BEGINS 27 The Farmer's Tale 28 The Cro-Magnon's Tale 34 ALL HUMANKIND 36 The Tasmanian's Tale 39 Eve's Tale 44 ARCHAIC HOMO SAPIENS 56 The Neanderthal's Tale 58 ERGASTS 59 The Ergast's Tale 63 HABILINES 68 The Handyman's Tale 69 APE-MEN 77 Little Foot's Tale 80 Epilogue to Little Foot's Tale 84 CHIMPANZEES 88 The Bonobo's Tale 92 GORILLAS 94 The Gorilla's Tale 95 ORANG UTANS 98 The Orang Utan's Tale 99 GIBBONS 104 The Gibbon's Tale 107 OLD WORLD MONKEYS 118 NEW WORLD MONKEYS 122 The Howler Monkey's Tale 125 TARSIERS 134 LEMURS, BUSHBABIES AND THEIR KIN 1 The Aye-Aye's Tale 140 THE GREAT CRETACEOUS CATASTROPHE COLUGOS AND TREE SHREWS 148 The Colugo's Tale 150 RODENTS AND RABBITKIND 152 The Mouse's Tale 155 The Beaver's Tale 157 LAURASIATHERES 162 The Hippo's Tale 165 Epilogue to the Hippo's Tale 170 The Seal's Tale 171 XENARTHRANS 178 PROTOSTOMES 314 The Armadillo's Tale 178 The Ragworm's Tale 322 AFROTHERES 182 The Brine Shrimp's Tale 325 MARSUPIALS 188 The Leaf Cutter's Tale 329 The Marsupial Mole's Tale 191 The Grasshopper's Tale 331 MONOTREMES 194 The Fruit Fly's Tale 343 The Duckbill's Tale 196 The Rotifer's Tale 352 What the Star-Nosed Mole said to the The Barnacle's Tale 359 Duckbilled Platypus 204 The Velvet Worm's Tale 362 MAMMAL-LIKE REPTILES 207 Epilogue to the Velvet Worm's Tale 373 ACOELOMORPH FLATWORMS 380 SAUROPSIDS 214 NIDARIANS Prologue to the Galapagos Finch's C 384 Tale 217 The Jellyfish's Tale 388 The Galapagos Finch's Tale 220 The Polypifer's Tale 390 The Peacock's Tale 222 CTENOPHORES 396 The Dodo's Tale 231 PLACOZOANS 398 The Elephant Bird's Tale 235 SPONGES 400 Epilogue to the Elephant Bird's Tale 242 The Sponge's Tale 404 HOANOFLAGELLATES AMPHIBIANS 246 C 406 The Salamander's Tale 252 The Choanoflagellate's Tale 407 The Narrowmouth's Tale 261 DRIPs 410 FUNGI 412 MOEBOZOANS LANTS The Axolotl's Tale 263 A 416 P 418 LUNGFISH 268 The Cauliflower's Tale 422 The Lungfish's Tale 269 0 The Redwood's Tale 425 UNCERTAIN COELACANTHS 272 434 The Mixotrich's Tale 439 THE GREAT RAY-FINNED FISH 274 ISTORIC ENDEZVOUS The Leafy Sea Dragon's Tale 274 H R 445 RCHAEA The Pike's Tale 278 A 448 EUBACTERIA The Mudskipper's Tale 279 450 The Cichlid's Tale 281 The Rhizobium's Tale 450 The Blind Cave Fish's Tale 288 Taq's Tale 459 The Flounder's Tale 290 CANTERBURY 464 THE SHARKS AND THEIR KIN 292 HOST'S RETURN 482 LAMPREYS AND HAGFISH 296 The Lamprey's Tale 299 LANCELETS 302 FURTHER READING 507 The Lancelet's Tale 303 NOTES 507 BIBLIOGRAPHY SEA SQUIRTS 306 © 510 INDEX 516 AMBULACRARIANS 310 THE CONCEIT OF HINDSIGHT 'History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.' MARK TWAIN 'History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with history.' CLARENCE DARROW History has been described as one damn thing after another. The remark can be seen as a warning against a pair of temptations but, duly warned, I shall cautiously flirt with both. First, the historian is tempted to scour the past for patterns that repeat themselves; or at least, following Mark Twain, to seek reason and rhyme for everything. This appetite for pattern affronts those who insist that, as Mark Twain will also be found to have said, 'History is usually a random, messy affair', going nowhere and following no rules. The second con- nected temptation is the vanity of the present: of seeing the past as aimed at our own time, as though the characters in history's play had nothing better to do with their lives than foreshadow us. Under names that need not trouble us, these are live issues in human history and they arise with greater force, and no greater agreement, on the longer time- scale of evolution. Evolutionary history can be represented as one damn species after another. But many biologists will join me in finding this an impoverished view. Look at evolution that way and you miss most of what matters. Evolution rhymes, patterns recur. And this doesn't just happen to be so. It is so for well understood reasons: Darwinian reasons mostly, for biology, unlike human hist- ory or even physics, already has its grand unifying theory, accepted by all in- formed practitioners, though in varying versions and interpretations. In writing evolutionary history I do not shrink from seeking patterns and principles, but I try to be careful about it. What of the second temptation, the conceit of hindsight, the idea that the past works to deliver our particular present? The late Stephen Jay Gould rightly pointed out that a dominant icon of evolution in popular mythology, a carica- ture almost as ubiquitous as lemmings jumping over cliffs (and that myth is false too), is a shambling file of simian ancestors, rising progressively in the wake of the erect, striding, majestic figure of Homo sapiens sapiens: man as evolution's last word (and in this context it always is man rather than woman); man as what the whole enterprise is pointing towards; man as a magnet, draw- ing evolution from the past towards his eminence. There is a physicist's version which is less obviously vainglorious and which I should mention in passing. This is the 'anthropic' notion that the very laws of physics themselves, or the fundamental constants of the universe, are a care- fully tuned put-up job, calculated to bring humanity eventually into existence.
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