Mad Social Scientist

Richard Dawkins, recently declared England's premier intellectual, and in my view the sanest man on earth, has a new book out, The Ancestor's Tale. (See this interview.) Its clever conceit is to trace backwards the ancestry of humans, from earlier primates to the first bacteria, focusing on "concestors", those ancestors which are the earliest common ancestors of groups of presently existing species. The march of concestors towards the root of the Tree of Life is like the pilgramage of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Highly recommended and entertaining, though not as original as, say, the Selfish Gene. It also is beautifully illustrated with scientific diagrams; one almost wonders if Edward Tufte were a consultant.