The pilgrims’ progress

A hundred million years ago, our ancestors were nocturnal mouse-like creatures, living in the shadows of the dinosaurs. Five hundred million years ago, our ancestors were fish, living near (or even in) the sea bottom. Two thousand million years ago, they were single-celled microbes, floating in the sea. Almost 4,000 million years ago, they were replicating molecules, lacking almost every feature that we expect in something that is live — except reproduction.

The evolutionary history of life is one of science’s great stories — a story that educated people like to know at least in outline, along with the history of European civilisation and the political history of their own country. There is a steady supply of new popular science books that describe it and, at one level, Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale is the latest offering of this kind.

But Dawkins tells the story differently from almost everyone else. He tells it backwards.