Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (47529)	12/14/2004 7:17:12 PM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Respond to of 50167

On <"all men are created equal" > a little lighter side.. RICHARD DAWKINS'S The Ancestor's Tale follows a band of pilgrims seeking their biological ancestors on a journey 4 billion years back in time. We modern humans are the pilgrims, and Dawkins acts as our host, invoking Geoffrey Chaucer's pilgrims journeying to Canterbury. Along the way we meet bands of animal, plant and other pilgrims at the points of our common ancestry, eventually reaching the dawn of life. Setting off from the present, it takes us just 10,000 years to meet the first farmers. These ancestors discovered how to domesticate plants, sparking the agricultural revolution and the transition from hunter-gatherers to a more settled lifestyle. About 30,000 years further back we arrive at Lascaux, France, to watch Cro-Magnons painting the cave walls with some of the earliest flowerings of art. We are still with our species. Go back around 1 million years and we encounter Homo erectus on the African savannah: if not our species, we are still with individuals who could be our direct ancestors. At around 5 to 7 million years ago we run into another band of pilgrims that set out at the same time as us. At this rendezvous with the chimpanzees, both we and they listen to our common ancestor's tale. Or, more accurately, we listen to Dawkins, who resists the temptation to have his animal pilgrims and ancestors speak - no camp turtles shouting "Dude" are heard in these pages. Chaucer's "nine and twenty" pilgrims journeyed as one company all the way to Canterbury. Dawkins's band grows at each rendezvous, as ever more inclusive groups form, all descendants of a common ancestor. The pilgrims encounter physical hardship in the form of mass extinctions and observe evolutionary revolutions in body plans and ways of life. Finally, at about 3500 million years ago, the whole troupe peers into the murky depths of the ancient Archaean sea to witness the first or ur-ancestor: the bacterial life form from which all life on Earth descends. This is Dawkins's Canterbury. If Chaucer's pilgrims found wisdom on their journey to the shrine of the holy "blisful" martyr Thomas Becket, who had helped them when they lay sick or weak, Dawkins's allegory is to give his pilgrims the wisdom to begin to grasp our origins and evolution. One piece of this wisdom is that, unlike Chaucer's pilgrims, we do not make the journey back to the present. Why? Because the tape of evolution cannot be replayed: it has no targets, we were not preordained. Evolution just randomly walks through time with its journey pushed this way and that by forces we now recognise as natural selection. Like Odysseus, were we to try to make our journey home, it is likely that no one would recognise us when we arrived. With flourishes like this combined with subtle insights of scientific understanding, Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale invents a new form of science as literature. Part-poetry and part-science, this book unashamedly asserts that our evolutionary history is a big idea that deserves to sit alongside the other big ideas in our intellectual canon. Mark Pagel is professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Reading, UK