Every holiday I always try to read a book – and this one was no exception. I thought I’d better top up my knowledge and understanding of evolutionary theory – not by studying The Descent of Man or the Origin of The Species, but by looking through the eyes of a modern day Darwinian Scholar – Richard Dawkins. Dawkins was for 10+ years Chair of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a renowned Evolutionary Biologist and a worthy successor to Darwin in the 21st century. Put to one side his outspoken views on God just for the moment, and you can read and fully appreciate the quality of scientific perception and the clarity of communication. When I was younger I read two of his other books, the ‘Selfish Gene’ and ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ and I would recommend both to any of you who hope to study Biology at university.
The book that I chose for this holiday is called ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’ – rather grandly described as ‘A pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life’. The book does relate to a pilgrimage – a journey of four billion years, and through it we, modern human beings, are the pilgrims, travelling back through time to seek out our ancestors. Simultaneously every other living creature is setting off on its own journey with the same mission. Each pilgrim tells its tale along the way, and covers the processes involved in the unfolding of life on Earth. Just over two centuries after the birth of the first evolutionist, Dawkins provides an account which is authoritative – whilst elegantly written.
A tale, then of journeys through time, and the book is the story of those journeys. There is an underlying thread, in that Dawkins models his book on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, that story of medieval pilgrims travelling together to Canterbury, telling their stories as they go. But there’s a difference – Chaucer’s pilgrims meet in London at a pub before they set out; Dawkins’ travellers join the pilgrimage as time goes in reverse from the present day all the way back to more than 3,000 million years ago. Their Canterbury is the origin of life.
The Chaucerian analogy is extended further using the analytical techniques of evolutionary biology to trace the ancestry of ancient texts. You see there are 85 different medieval manuscript versions of the Canterbury Tales, all had copied, and so all containing mistakes. Mistakes are traceable, are cumulative and can be analysed – but hang on a minute doesn’t that sound a little like DNA changes and mutation? – or even evolutionary change? Darwin would have been fascinated – and relieved probably – that his ideas had survived and, more than that, had flourished with the fantastic changes in scientific understanding over the 150 years since the publication of ‘The Origin of The Species’.
Of course, Dawkins ‘doesn’t do God’. So where does his pilgrimage take him, and where does he end up? I think the most appropriate summary is given by the author himself. Towards the end of the book he says this:
“If … I reflect on the whole pilgrimage of which I have been a grateful part, my overwhelming reaction is one of amazement. One of my reactions to religious belief is that it fails to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world”.
I suspect that many people with religious belief would agree on this point.
He goes on to tell a story about two biologists arguing – an elder statesman was having a long and complicated disagreement with a colleague. As they finished their discussion, the older man winked at the other knowingly and said ‘you know, we really do agree. It’s just that you say it wrong!’
Perhaps Professor Dawkins – and evolution – can be reconciled with religion after all…
SDS
