Reddit Reddit reviews The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

We found 9 Reddit comments about The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
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9 Reddit comments about The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution:

u/heresybob · 3 pointsr/evolution

Read Dawkin's Ancestor Tale - In short, creatures that survive by hunting and foraging through small enclosed spaces with little light need to know what's in front and on the side of them as they creep around.

Whiskers are used to provide that data. What's really interesting is the amount of gray matter (sensory processing) dedicated to the feedback.

Humans have large sensory areas for eyes. Dogs for olfactory. Moles for their whiskers.

u/tikael · 3 pointsr/atheism

Overviews of the evidence:

The greatest show on earth

Why evolution is true

Books on advanced evolution:

The selfish gene

The extended phenotype

Climbing mount improbable

The ancestors tale

It is hard to find a better author than Dawkins to explain evolutionary biology. Many other popular science books either don't cover the details or don't focus entirely on evolution.

I will hit one point though.

>I have a hard time simply jumping from natural adaption or mutation or addition of information to the genome, etc. to an entirely different species.

For this you should understand two very important concepts in evolution. The first is a reproductive barrier. Basically as two populations of a species remain apart from each other (in technical terms we say there is no gene flow between them) then repoductive barriers becomes established. These range in type. There are behavioral barriers, such as certain species of insects mating at different times of the day from other closely related species. If they both still mated at the same time then they could still produce viable offspring. Other examples of behavior would be songs in birds (females will only mate with males who sing a certain way). There can also be physical barriers to reproduction, such as producing infertile offspring (like a donkey and a horse do) or simply being unable to mate (many bees or flies have different arrangements of their genitalia which makes it difficult or impossible to mate with other closely related species. Once these barriers exist then the two populations are considered two different species. These two species can now further diverge from each other.

The second thing to understand is the locking in of important genes. Evolution does not really take place on the level of the individual as most first year biology courses will tell you. It makes far more sense to say that it takes place on the level of the gene (read the selfish gene and the extended phenotype for a better overview of this). Any given gene can have a mutation that is either positive, negative, of neutral. Most mutations are neutral or negative. Let's say that a certain gene has a 85% chance of having a negative mutation, a 10% chance of a neutral mutation, and a 5% chance of a positive mutation. This gene is doing pretty good, from it's viewpoint it has an 85% chance of 'surviving' a mutation. What is meant by this is that even though one of it's offspring may have mutated there is an 85% chance that the mutated gene will perform worse than it and so the mutation will not replace it in the gene pool. If a neutral mutation happens then this is trouble for the original gene, because now there is a gene that does just as good a job as it in the gene pool. At this point random fluctuations of gene frequency called genetic drift take over the fate of the mutated gene (I won't go into genetic drift here but you should understand it if you want to understand evolution).

The last type of mutation, a positive mutation is what natural selection acts on. This type of mutation would also change the negative/neutral/positive mutation possibilities. so the newly positively mutated gene might have frequencies of 90/7/3 Already it has much better odds than the original gene. OK, one more point before I explain how this all ties together. Once a gene has reached the 100/0/0 point it does not mean that gene wins forever, there can still be mutations in other genes that affect it. A gene making an ant really good at flying doesn't matter much when the ant lives in tunnels and bites off its own wings, so that gene now has altered percentages in ants. It is this very complex web that makes up the very basics of mutations and how they impact evolution (if you are wondering how common mutations are I believe they happen about once every billion base pairs, so every human at conception has on average 4 mutations that were not present in either parent)

This all ties back together by understanding that body plan genes (called hox genes) lock species into their current body plans, by reducing the number of possible positive or neutral mutations they become crucial to the organisms survival. As evolutionary time progresses these genes become more and more locked in, meaning that the body plans of individuals become more and more locked in. So it is no wonder that coming in so late to the game as we are we see such diversity in life and we never see large scale form mutations. Those type of mutations became less likely as the hox genes became locked in their comfy spots on the unimpeachable end of the mutation probability pool. That is why it is hard to imagine one species evolving into another, and why a creationist saying that they will believe evolution when a monkey gives birth to a human is so wrong.

Hopefully I explained that well, it is kind of a dense subject and I had to skip some things I would rather have covered.

u/citizen_reddit · 2 pointsr/atheism

Almost totally off topic, so my apologies.

I'd advise you read Dawkin's An Ancestor's Tale - it isn't specifically a piece of 'atheist literature', but in it's scope and execution it is one of the most incredible books I've ever read and I think everyone, atheist or not, should read it. Be warned however, that it is dense and many people have difficulty getting through it.

u/[deleted] · 2 pointsr/askscience

The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins covers this type of material. Although it won't let you study an arbitrary organism, it gives a fascinating account of where the common ancestors of humans and other groups of creatures diverged.

u/berlinbrown · 1 pointr/atheism

"he civil rights issues of the united states in the early to middle 1900s happened around a classification of "black". "

I said, "where are they" not "where were they". So, right now, how are people grouped?

"at you are saying does not in any way apply to this conversation"

What does apply to the conversation?

What is race to you?

Once again, discussions on race are non-nonsensical as you have proven. No one can adequately define what race is. Race to one person is completely different to another. Even if you define race and can group people, what is the point?

If I am being annoying or ignorant. Please clarify your position, use current media reports, use concrete evidence.

The only evidence I can bring is what Dawkins mentioned on race:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0618005838/vdare


""Interobserver agreement suggests that racial classification is not totally uninformative, but what does it inform about? About things like eye shape and hair curliness. For some reason it seems to be the superficial, external, trivial characteristics that are correlated with race—perhaps especially facial characteristics.""

u/cyclopath · 1 pointr/books

I recommend Ancestors Tale as your next Dawkins book.

u/missinfidel · 1 pointr/AskReddit

If you're interested in the subject, there are lots and lots of great resources on it, though nearly all of it focuses on human evolution. Even if you're just interested in evolution as a whole, Dawkins' book "The Ancestor's Tale" is a really great way to get familiar with modern species' progenitors in a really engrossing way.

u/Reverie_of_an_INTP · 1 pointr/INTP

I enjoyed the ancestor's tale by Dawkins.

u/Spurnem · 1 pointr/biology

If you're looking for a biology-related book to read when you can't take textbooks any more, I highly recommend The Ancestor's Tale. My high school AP Bio teacher had us read that (and write reports on every chapter to make sure we'd read it thoroughly instead of skimming), and that taught me more biology than I ever realized. I'm almost done my bachelor's and I'm still encountering material in classes that is familiar to me because of the Ancestor's Tale.