Having recently become enamoured with Richard Dawkins' excellent atheistic tome "The God Delusion", I thought it might be time to sort out this evolution malarkey. I'd never really understood it, which was one reason I stayed agnostic for so long. So I thought i'd read The Ancestor's Tale, which pretty much sums up the whole thing.
Except that it really doesn't. I was looking for an explanation of how genes mutate, and maybe i'm missing something, but that mechanism didn't seem to be spelled out here. Maybe it was assumed knowledge. Dawkins certainly didn't embarrassedly hedge around it, so I can only surmise that it's so basic a concept that it didn't need explaining twice. He seemed to do that a lot: simply referring to his earlier works than use the same explanation twice. It's a bit of a bugger, but I suppose i'd better read "The Selfish Gene" now.
I understand about natural selection, but The Ancestor's Tale also introduced me to the concept of sexual selection, something I had previously not thought about. It also looked at the preconditions for race, quite fairly and without judgement.
All in all, a good 'little' book, by which I mean that I enjoyed it, but it took me about a month of hard slogging to get through. Now I think i'll go for something lighter, "Journeys With Gelignite Jack", by Evan Green. Stay tuned.
1 comment:
perhaps i can resolve your dilemma, over a few beers?
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