Entry #7: The Ancestor's Tale Ch 1-2

In Chapter 1 of the Ancestor’s Tale, the two misconceptions that Dawkins tells us to try and avoid are one that historians try to go back and “scour the past for patterns that repeat themselves.” According to Mark Twain they want to “seek reason and rhyme for everything.” The next one has to do with the present. Dawkins says that evolution is not something to repeat but something that rhymes. The second misconception away from the past and present is the conceit of hindsight. According to Dawkins. The conceit of hindsight is “the idea that the past works to deliver our particular present.” Dawkins talks about the different theories and the physicists that brings about how our universe was made and how it was brought about to produce humanity. How scientists determine the timing and the human migration out of Africa is by exploring family trees instead of family genes. What Y-chromosome Adam and mtDNA Eve tells us about human origins is that they are only one set of MRCA’s, there are many more. Second, they were not even together. Third, they are shifting titles and fourth there was no information to single either one of them out. This means that they did have multiple partners but Adam went down the male line and Eve went down the female line. This may not be the rue story because Dawkins even said that relying on a single gene could be misleading and there are many more factors that can be added into how our human origins came about.