Stories from the origin of life
Stories from the origin of life. A journey through time in Darwin's footsteps is a popular science non-fiction book by the English evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published by Ullstein Verlag in 2008 . The 800-page work was published in the English original under the title The Ancestor's Tale in 2004 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson-Verlag.
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Summary
The book is based on the medieval stories Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer , in which the members of a group of pilgrims tell their stories on their way to Canterbury . The Pilgrims at Dawkins are today, recent creatures that in the evolutionary tree out on the path about their ancestors to the common origin of life. The starting point is we humans who come across at the branches along their path in the evolutionary family tree (this neologism introduced in the book describes a biological species which has a common ancestor with humans who take part in the journey).
At the first encounter around 250,000 generations ago, the chimpanzees and bonobos come to us and we meet a fellow passenger who was the ancestor of all chimpanzees, bonobos and humans living today. In a total of 40 encounters, Dawkins uses individual representatives of the ever-growing group of pilgrims to deal with various topics of evolutionary theory, such as sexual selection using the example of the peacock , pedomorphosis or neoteny in the axolotl or the problem of speciation using the example of cichlids . The author goes on to explain the Dollo law in the history of the cave fish , the problem of the concept of race in grasshoppers through to humans and the theory of the Hox genes using the example of fruit flies .
In addition, the "domestication of chloroplasts or mitochondria " by eukaryotic cells is described as a great historical encounter , although this is not an encounter in the sense of the pilgrim analogy. The arrival in Canterbury corresponds to reaching the root of the evolutionary tree and thus the origin of life, to which a separate chapter is devoted. Finally, Dawkins lets the host of the pilgrimage return and discusses, among other things, the repeatability and inevitability of historical evolution.
Encounters
The following table shows the encounters covered in the book along with the given estimates of the time of the encounter.
| encounter | Ride along | million years ago |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Humanity , archaic Homo sapiens , | 0 |
| 1 | Chimpanzees | 6th |
| 2 | Gorillas | 7th |
| 3 | Orangutans | 14th |
| 4th | Gibbons | 18th |
| 5 | Old world monkeys | 25th |
| 6th | New world monkeys | 40 |
| 7th | Goblin lemurs | 58 |
| 8th | Lemurs , bush babies and their relatives | 63 |
| 9 | Pointed squirrels and giant gliders | 70 |
| 10 | Rodents and rabbits | 75 |
| 11 | Laurasian herpes | 85 |
| 12 | Sub-articulated animals | 95 |
| 13 | Afrothera | 105 |
| 14th | Marsupials | 140 |
| 15th | Monotremes | 180 |
| 16 | Sauropsids | 310 |
| 17th | Amphibians | 340 |
| 18th | Lungfish | 417 |
| 19th | Coelacanth | 425 |
| 20th | Ray fins | 440 |
| 21st | Sharks and their relatives | 460 |
| 22nd | Lampreys and their relatives | 530 |
| 23 | Lancet fish | 560 |
| 24 | Sea squirts | 565 |
| 25th | Ambulacraria | 570 |
| 26th | Protostomy | 590 |
| 27 | Flatworms : Acoelomorpha | 630 |
| 28 | Cnidarians | 680 |
| 29 | Rib jellyfish | 730 |
| 30th | Placozoa | 780 |
| 31 | Sponges | 800 |
| 32 | Collared flagellates | 900 |
| 33 | DRIPs | (?) |
| 34 | Mushrooms | (?) |
| 35 | Amoebozoa | (?) |
| 36 | plants | (?) |
| 37 | Unsure candidates ( Euglena, for example) | (?) |
| 38 | Archaea | (?) |
| 39 | Eubacteria | (?) |
Reviews
“Richard Dawkins tells colorful, soulful and knowledgeable. Life teems with life in his book, every snail, every fish, every insect is described with a loving, sometimes almost awe-inspiring look. He is proud, Dawkins emphasizes again and again, to be able to count such wonderful and amazing animals among his ancestors. The 800-page tome is also an appearance with high standards: Dawkins, professor for "Public Understanding of Science", takes up the self-declared fight against the Bible, Koran and Co. in scope and weight. The advocate of scientific logic and reason aims openly at the mind with his book. "
“However, Dawkins cannot completely abandon his confrontation course. So he again taunts ad nauseam against believers in creation and representatives of intelligent design. Dawkins doesn't offer a great conceptual leap. This is possibly one of the book's strengths. "
"Richard Dawkins'" Stories from the Origin of Life "is currently the most readable and worth considering book about evolution in general. [...] He neither condemned religion to the brim , as in his books about " God's delusion " and the " selfish gene ", nor did he add the story to a molecular engine that turns living beings into vehicles for genes the only instruction to hurl their own genes into the world as numerous as possible. "
book
- Richard Dawkins: The ancestor's tale. A pilgrimage to the dawn of life. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2004, ISBN 0-297-82503-8 (In German: Stories from the origin of life. A journey through time in Darwin's footsteps. With the collaboration of Yan Wong. Translated from the English by Sebastian Vogel . Ullstein, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-550-08748-6 ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ 3.5 billion years on 800 pages. In: dradio.de. October 21, 2008, accessed May 2, 2015 .
- ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 15, 2009, No. 12 / Page 7: Who was I before? In: FAZ.net . January 15, 2009, accessed May 2, 2015 .
- ↑ Christopher Schrader: Evolution - pilgrimage to the beginning of life. In: sueddeutsche.de . May 17, 2010, accessed May 2, 2015 .