Department of Orotundity

The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins is the kind of book I imagine a creationist would love, if a creationist could bring herself to read 600 pages of Richard Dawkins. On the other hand, anyone who was that committed to creationism probably would find it more congenial and comforting to re-read the same number of pages in the Bible. In my micro-print Bible, that will include the entire old testament, including the apocrypha. In regular size print it would go at least to Proverbs.

One of the unfortunate things about being a famous (even is small circles) author is that editors hesitate to use the knife on your work. This book could have been improved by a whole set of Santoku blades. Dawkins has some great stuff here, but like the elusive missing link, it’s buried along with the non-essential and non-informative. Dawkins goes on like a genial professor who has more lecture hours to fill than he has germane material, so he throws in casual asides to (he imagines) amuse his students, but really just because he loves to hear himself talk. Casual readers beware: The Ancestor’s Tale should have been a 375 page précis rather than a tome.

If a creationist ever did take the time to read it, she would discover that Dawkins reveals all of evolution’s embarrassing flaws and lapses along with its marvels and complex beauty. We don’t know why humans are hairless, upright and big-brained. We don’t know why some successful animals have sex and others don’t. There’s more we don’t know than what we do. Dawkins, of course, is a confirmed evolutionist and sets out in this book to illustrate some of the fundamental, but almost universally misunderstood principles of evolution along with the gaps yet to be filled in. In that he succeeds, even if his extended metaphor - he is writing "after the manner of" Canterbury Tales - often gets in the way of the information.

The cartoon, which appears in this week’s New Yorker, neatly illustrates one of the bugaboos that confounds both creationists and many evolutionists. One of the things even evolutionists get wrong is that there is no bright line dividing species as you go through the generations, but a continuum. It’s just that from our backward-looking point of view, we see the beginning and the end, but miss the gradually changing middle stages that now may be extinct. He points out a couple of modern exceptions that illustrate the point.

One is the Herring Gull and the Black Backed Gull, which live around the polar region. In Europe they are distinct, but if you follow the Earth either East or West, they gradually fade into each other until, when you get to Siberia, there is no
difference between them. A spatial reconstruction of what evolution normally does in time.

I have to admit I never knew most of the things he writes about, so I guess I shouldn’t complain, but that’s what bloggers are supposed to do, isn’t it?