Name: The Ancestor's Tale
ISBN: 9780618619160

Richard Dawkins

A renowned biologist provides a sweeping chronicle of more than four billion years of life on Earth, shedding new light on evolutionary theory and history, sexual selection, speciation, extinction, and genetics.

A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

The Ancestor's Tale

Gavin

Loads of lovely examples and vivid analogies. The sidebar on races is surprisingly careful and illuminating - that portion of the phenomenon that's genetic is more straightforward than I’d thought, in my Arts student way. 

(Though his placid definitiveness about the social interpretation is obvs controversial as hell. He’s a strict philosophical eliminativist, implying that the harm resulting from reifying race totally outweighs all gains from positive discrimination. This is unclear to say the least.) 

I hadn’t heard of the ‘two-fold cost’ of sex before, super-interesting. 

Not as snarky as you’d expect, and full of alternative perspectives so long as they’re other evolutionists’ perspectives.

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

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