Originally written on Tuesday, 1. July 2008.

Publishers very often have large and imposingly heavy desks, behind which they smoke large cigars and ponder the return of the black polo neck jumper. As is their way, they are often waiting for the publishing panacea, a large heavy book to drop out of the skies and sell like hot cakes on a very cold winters morning.

It is with the thought of heavy set furniture in mind that I bring this, the first in what will naturally be the occasional review of what I am sure will be, if not currently are, seminal books. For this first review I have chosen to review two books, both by the same author, on not a dissimilar subject, evolutionary anthropology.

Richard Dawkins first hit the best sellers list circa twenty years ago with his initial work, The Selfish Gene. This book propelled Dawkins to the top of the best sellers list for the first time, and established his name as a witty, urbane and humorous writer, bring the complicated subject of evolutionary science to a much wider audience. His most recent and, arguably the book for which Dawkins is probably most famous is The God Delusion.

The God Delusion has been reprinted in more languages than I realised there actually were, have sold more copies than almost all other books in this genre put together, and has been subjected to more controversy and abuse than almost every other book since the Satanic Verse of the mid 1980’s.

However, The God Delusion is not part of this review, it being currently on the best sellers list and a book which has been reviewed more than once elsewhere, and is, it could be argued, the logical conclusion to a series of academic works by Dawkins and others. With this in mind therefore, I am going to provide a ‘two for one’ value review of ‘The Blind Watchmaker’, Dawkins third book and The Ancestors Tale.

For those that even only vaguely interested in the ‘where do we come from’, or ‘how does evolution work’ questions or even simply the ‘bloody hell, this is amazing’ statement, then either of these two books would provide most, if not all of the answers or directions that you could possible need.

‘The Blind Watchmaker’ tries to answer the question of ‘where did we come from / how did we get here’ in a witty and urbane style of writing that is never imposing, never condescending and never patronising. Dawkins style of writing allows a subject of ever increasing complexity to be presented in a witty, articulate, erudite but, more importantly, entirely readable manner. This does not mean to say that Dawkins is in any way ‘dumbing down’ with his style of prose. Moreover, Dawkins has a wit and intelligence that allows complex matters to be be presented both with non of the complexity diluted and a level of humour to make the corners of mouth creasing ever more.

This is not to say that Dawkins is treading the fine line between opinion and banality. Not at all. The reader is very much made aware of Dawkins views and opinions, no more than one occasion. Indeed Dawkins can be both scathing and vitriolic to those whose views are not substantiated with anything less than full rigour.

The conservative christian creationist lobby, whose main argument over recent years has manifest itself in the ‘intelligent design’ mantra, have often used the rational that the universe and all life contained therein is simply too complicated, like a watch, to have come about by chance, and therefore ‘must have been designed’, intelligently, also like a watch.

As one might have guessed, Dawkins, with his book The Blind Watch maker, is attempting to provide information that will allow the reader to understand for themselves why the creationist manifesto is, frankly, tosh. And this is something he does with consummate ease and simplicity, with a ready wit and humour that bounces through the book, almost forcing one to keep turning the pages, for the next nugget of wit and pith.

But lets get down to the nuts and bolts of this. This book simply shreds the ideas and tautology of pretty much every religious based argument for the existence of life. It has been the conservative christian creationist movement in America that has been one of the most vocal critics of Dawkins over the years, but this book, and for that matter The Ancestors Tale will pretty much tear apart any religious preconceptions any one has, irrespective of their religious ideology, as to why Darwin was such a visionary.

The only requirement for reading either of these two books, or for that matter, any one of a number of other books by Dawkins, the ONLY requirement, is simply an open mind. A mind that is not encumbered by religious dogma, a mind that will seek out information and one that is prepared to ask simple honest questions of their own upbringing.

If one is prepared for this, if one is able digest these books for the honest thinking they provoke and allows oneself to ask the questions that have been denied them by the religious teachings of the religion imposed upon them, then one can set sail on a journey of discovery the likes of which they may never have even contemplated.

However, Dawkins is not aiming simply to take apart the religious doctrine that has pervaded the previous two millennia or so, however, he simply sets about, in a plain and straight forward way to explain ‘how the physical living world is the way that it is’. The fact that this will simply, plainly and effectively undermine almost all reasons for having ‘belief in religion’ is a consequence, not a reason for writing the book. However, in choosing the title of ‘watch maker’ he makes it clear from the beginning that this book is not for the intellectually timid or the chronically closed minded.

And as such is the Ancestors Tale. For those who have read Pale Blue Dot, the classic Carl Sagan work and mix this with Chaucers most famous work, one will have some idea of the structure of this Dawkins book.

Dawkins takes one on a journey to the past, through 450 pages and four and half billions years of earth history allowing us to ‘meet’ our ancestors. The premise is a simple one. To travel back in time and stop off at major and, sometimes, minor events on the evolutionary track, meetings the species that, were one to look back over one shoulder to where one had just come, had just split to form new species.

In this way, we, as humans, are able to track how we have ended up the way that we are, how amazing it is that we as humans are even here at all and perhaps, most importantly, how small we are as an evolutionary species. We may have over six milliard of us on the planet and we may have created more havoc and mayhem than almost all other species put together, but we are, to paraphrase a much better man than I, a pale blue dot on the evolutionary path that is planet earth.