I have been mostly reading ...

... a fascinating book by Richard Dawkins called The Ancestor's Tale.

I like reading what I call popular science books, i.e. covering serious science, not bogged down with heavy equations or reams of latin but requiring some thought and concentration when reading.

The Ancestor's Tale is structured similarly to the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. Chaucer had his characters tell tales to pass the time whilst they were on a pilgrimage. Dawkins takes us on a pilgrimage back through time to the emergence of life at the evolutionary Canterbury. The tale starts with Homo Sapiens (not because we're better than any other end point of the tree of life, just because we're understandably interested in our own evolutionary past). The pilgrimage is punctuated by tales "told" by successive concestors. The term concester refers to the common ancestor shared by related groups of life, the point at which one branch splits into two (or more).

There are a few places where it's hard work and sometimes ten or twenty pages were all I could manage in a reading. This is nothing to do with Dawkin's writing style, more to do with my limited biology knowledge. But perseverance is rewarded with fascinating insights *, beautiful illustrations and ultimately a discussion about the current theories of how life on earth actually began.

* Did you know that when oxygen was first released into the atmosphere through biochemical processes it was actually poisonous to life?

* Or that Hippos and Whales are closely related?

* Or that Lactose tolerance is only a relatively new evolutionary step in humans and those who are Lactose intolerant have an earlier non-mutated form of the particular gene(s)?

Definitely not light holiday reading but a very rewarding and enlightening book.