Books by Richard Dawkins (Study Guide): The Selfish Gene, the Blind Watchmaker, the Extended Phenotype, the Ancestor's Tale, the God Delusion Paperback -

From the publisher

This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: The Selfish Gene, the Blind Watchmaker, the Extended Phenotype, the Ancestor's Tale, the God Delusion, River Out of Eden, the Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution, Unweaving the Rainbow, a Devil's Chaplain, Climbing Mount Improbable, Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: The Ancestor's Tale (subtitled A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life) is a 2004 popular science book by Richard Dawkins, with contributions from Dawkins' research assistant Yan Wong. It follows the path of humans backwards through evolutionary history, meeting humanity's cousins as they converge on common ancestors. The book was nominated for the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Cladogram showing relationship between mammalian species as recounted in the bookThe narrative is structured as a pilgrimage, with all modern animals following their own path through history to the origin of life. Humans meet their evolutionary cousins at rendezvous points along the way, the points at which the lineage diverged. At each point Dawkins attempts to infer, from molecular and fossil evidence, the probable form of the most recent common ancestor and describes the modern animals that join humanity's growing travelling party. This structure is inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The pilgrimage visits a total of 40 "rendezvous points" from rendezvous zero, the most recent common ancestor of all of humanity, to rendezvous 39, eubacteria, the ancestor of all surviving organisms. Though Dawkins is confident of the essential shape of this phylogenetic taxonomy, he enters caveats on a small number of branch points where a compelling weight of evidence had not been assembled at the time of writing. At...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=95752