The Ancestor's Tale

What Hacker News says

1. pdonisJul 2026
   > Dawkins never had much of a research career.

   Perhaps not, but I have found his popular books like The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale very informative.

   Unfortunately, when he ventures outside the domain of his professional expertise, he doesn't do as well. For example, in The God Delusion, which is basically a book-length diatribe against orthodox religious belief, he comes out at one point with this:

   Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”

   If we grant for the sake of argument that typical orthodox religious cant is BS, this is just as much BS. The phrase "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" comes to mind.

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2. canadianfellaOct 2024
   The Selfish Gene was published in 1976, not 1989. I read it as a teen in the 90s and it is probably my favourite book of all time.

   Also,

   Bill Bryson’s “Short History of Nearly Everything”.

   Brian Greene’s “The Fabric of the Cosmos” (and all of his other books)

   Richard Dawkins’ “The Ancestor’s Tale” and “The Blind Watchmaker” are also amazing.

   Fiction:

   Adrian Czajkowski‘s “Children of Time” and Orson Scott Card‘s “Ender’s Game” are both anong my favourites.

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3. KineticLensmanDec 2023
   For a complementary take on this, I'd recommend 'The Ancestor's Tale' [0] by Richard Dawkins. It goes backwards through time, focussing on the points where our history branches from a common ancestor to different modern 'cousins'. In other words, similarly to the tree of life explorer, it's looking at the non-leaf nodes (the branching points) inside the tree of life, albeit with a fixed path, but adding info about what actually changed at the branching point. So we successively meet other hominids, primates, non-primate mammals, non-mammal chordates, non-chordate animals, etc etc, each with many different sub-divisions. It's quite a unique perspective, and brings home just how extensive the tree of life actually is.

   [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancestor%27s_Tale

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4. CSMastermindOct 2023
   To anyone considering reading Dawkins let me highly recommend The Ancestor's Tale over The Selfish Gene.

   It's easily not only the better work but Dawkin's best and one of the best books I've personally read.

   I always cringe when I see The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, etc listed because you're not getting his absolute best stuff.

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5. progbitsSep 2023
   Yeah almost every nonfiction book is like this which makes me hate reading them (plus half the stuff in psychology/behavioral economics books is unreplicated fabulation).

   Small subthread derailment - nonfiction books which are worth the full length. I'll start:

   The Making of the Atomic Bomb; Gödel, Escher, Bach; The Ancestor's Tale; Bad Pharma

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6. jacquesmMay 2023
   No, there are many forks before that one.

   If this stuff interests you I would like to recommend Dawkins' 'The Ancestor's Tale', it is pretty accessible and walks you back through time step-by-step.

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