Sunday, January 1, 2006 | Science : Interviews | print version

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

Richard Dawkins - CBC Radio

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From radio.cbc.ca

Aired: December 4, 2004

Professor Richard Dawkins seems to have a talent for bringing new perspectives to thinking about evolution. In his new book, The Ancestor's Tale, the perspective is looking backwards. He traces our evolution from today back to the "meetings" we had with other species in our evolutionary past: for example, the meeting we had with chimpanzees when we diverged from a common ancestor some six million years ago. By following these meetings all the way through the history of life on Earth, Prof. Dawkins retraces our evolutionary history, and how we're related to all modern life on earth. He embellishes this exploration by casting the story as a series of stories, echoing the tales in Chaucer's medieval Canterbury Tales. In our interview, Prof. Dawkins explores meetings in the Hippo's tale, the Marsupial Mole's tale and the Brine Shrimp's tale. Professor Dawkins is the Charles Symoni professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.

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Quotes of Note:

"Most people can't bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays. How are they supposed to live somewhere very similar to it for eternity?"

Mark Twain

"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."

Bertrand Russell

"I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam -- good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system."

Gore Vidal

"I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so (see Ibn Warraq's excellent book, Why I am not a Muslim). Moonies and scientologists get a bad press, but they just haven't been around as long as the accepted religions. Theology is a respectable discipline when it studies such subjects as moral philosophy, the psychology of religious belief and, above all, biblical history and literature. Like Bertie Wooster, my knowledge of the Bible is above average. I seem to know Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon almost by heart. I think that the Bible as literature should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum - you can't understand English literature and culture without it. But insofar as theology studies the nature of the divine, it will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine. Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns. "

Richard Dawkins

"I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

Mark Twain