Good reference book for understanding biology if you have a personal interest. It was helpful to bring me to an understanding of environmental adaptations and specializations for. surviving change or becoming better at a nitch. ( )

It’s something I’d wondered myself in the past: not how we see colours, not the biological technicalities of colour vision, but what they’re for, why we see in colour at all. And after reading one particular essay in this extraordinary book, then mulling it over while out being taken for a walk by my dog, I suddenly saw the answer to that. It wasn’t exactly what the essay was about; that was more to do with the ways in which very different animals sense the world around them (the star-nosed mole, the bat, the platypus, or us humans) but I got even more out of it than the author had put in. It had already crossed my mind years before that, with her almost unbelievably sensitive nose, I’m betting my dog doesn’t just smell the world in colour, but in full on, in-your-face, technicolour—and now, if that’s so, I also understood why. And all that from a single short essay among dozens, a three-page sliver tucked away among a humongous seven hundred.
   The book itself isn’t easy to characterise in a short review. It’s patterned after Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and just as that was a series of reflections on life, so is this; but while, for Chaucer, that meant human life, in The Ancestor’s Tale it’s all of life on Earth, everything else that lives here too. The “stories” are actually essays about the whole business of being a tiny living part of this planet.
   Perhaps some will be put off by the author’s name, which would be a pity. Dawkins is used as a human punch-bag by an impressive variety of people, on which to vent their own shortcomings, frustrations and bile; but you get a truer picture here: more likeable than the rabble would have you believe, as clear-headed and meticulous a guide as you could ask for to lead an odyssey across several billion years—and even has a sense of humour (although the publishers should have handed out free gas-masks ahead of the paddlefish-up-a-creek joke!).
   An exceptional book. ( )

Richard Dawkins does a wonderful job at leading the reader on a grand pilgrimage throughout the eons, introducing you to our great evolutionary ancestors. He starts the journey working backwards, beginning with Homo Sapiens and then the earliest bipedal apes like Homo Habilis, then ending with the earliest replicating life, the one that would've started it all billions of years ago. Unfortunately, it didn't leave any fossils behind (soft-body creatures tend not to sadly but it has happened at a site in China) but if we work the molecular clock backwards we can deduce that somewhere in the 'primordial soup' a molecule began to copy itself, and it was really good at it.

As we meet the different pilgrims Dawkins explains how evolution shaped life in the most exciting and unusual ways. Some creatures on our planet function in the most ridiculous ways. I don't wish to spoil these parts but it is awe-inspiring for sure.

This was a fun and truly educating read for me. I learned so much about the different kinds of life that inhabit our planet. Human beings are just one tiny branch in the grand tree of life. We have only been here for a second in geological time, a drop in the bucket. The Ancestor's Tale is a humbling experience. ( )

My first Dawkins book was The Greatest Show On Earth, which is one of the best books I've ever read. It was accessible, well-written (clear and explanatory) and it made you want more. So I decided to buy (and read) The Ancestor's Tale. That was in 2011. :P That book is a little thicker, yet also written in an accessible way...

...At least until, say, rendez-vous/chapter 20, when it's fish time. As Menno Schilthuizen writes in his review - see http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/591352332 - "The level of the text is rather uneven. Some chapters are splendid science writing, while others are humdrum, dense, or even impossible to wade through." And so I skipped the rest of the chapters to read the ending, the conclusion. Yes, it all is interesting how every species is connected, how one led to the other, etc... how bacteria lead to us and other animals. From humans to apes and monkeys over amphibians, fish towards flies and worms and ending with bacteria.

All in all, The Ancestor's Tale is a very good book and a must-read if you want to find out about heritage and how old species lead to new. But you've got to keep your mind to it. ( )

Masterly as ever. As a non-scientist I found it clear and easy to understand (apart from a few sections about creatures I'd never heard of). Little touches of humour or personal experience help to lighten what is really a hefty magnum opus covering the whole history and origins of life on earth. as the story delves deeper into the past and into the oceans, you get a sense of how tiny and perhaps accidental is Man; like looking into deep space .

Heard an abridged version on audio some years back (of which I remember little); Worth a third reading. ( )