The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life

Abstract

Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life Richard Dawkins Orion Publishing Group, London, 2004 In his latest book: Ancestor's A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life, Dawkins reviews the ancestry of living entities on this planet, going back four billion years. He seeks to trace related species to the point where they unite in descent from a common ancestral population. Thus the common origin of and chimpanzees was some 6 million years ago, and for Old and New World monkeys, some 40 million years ago. We are also led through the earth's tectonic displacements with their influence on animal clade developments. Excellently illustrated, the book shows that modern humanity originated not out of Africa but that there were separate evolutionary developments in the four main regions: Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia/Pacific. He notes that during the past thirty thousand years there have been many exchanges between certain of these areas. With all this emphasis on development in nature, it is astonishing to read, in his chapter The Grasshopping Tale, that he chooses to accept the common and simplistic interbreeding criterion as the measure for recognizing separate species with different genetic structures. Accordingly, Dawkins finds the human species today rather homogeneous with only a five to fifteen percent genetic variation (this is incidentally also the number for the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees). As this is to be measured with respect to hundreds of millions of genes or more, there are still tens of millions of possible variations. Yet Dawkins comes to the conclusion that race is not an important aspect in human relations. To find that conclusion in a book on the variations of mammals in nature can be explained by the term political correctness. Dawkins' so-called uniform species Homo has enormous variances in brain capacity and development. Modern gene determination shows clear, race-defined variations in the efficiency of drugs. In studies of single nucleotide polymorphism in the three major groups (White, Black, Asian), it becomes clear that there are genetically based differences which must be considered in drug efficiency tests (Science, 18th February, 2005; p. 1072). Here it is shown that identifiable SNPvariations, the linkage disequilibria of functional genomic elements, explain differences in complex human traits and allow us to investigate genetic variation within and between human populations. When Dawkins overlooks the importance of differences in human development and plays down the social significance of racial classification, he seems to be making the kind of statement an author will make when he wishes to look like a nice guy, after having listed all the enormous, evolutionary differences in nature that his book describes. …