Just finished this. Quite an amazing piece of work. Over 600 pages and could have been longer. I think he rushed the last few chapters a little, but then I always tend to feel that way about books I like; I don't want them to end.
Bascially, it tells the story of human evolution by walking bakwards through time, devoting each of 40 or so chapters to successivly more ancient "rendevous points" where increasingly more distantly related groups of extant species join our own ancestrial linage at increasingly more ancient common ancestors. If you have ever wonderred how far back you have to go to find a common ancestor between humans and chimps or dogs or cynobacteria and which genes and traits are old and which are new, this is the book for you. There are very clear discussions along the way on a variety of related topics from radioactive dating (why and how it works) to fossilation mechanisms to gene philogonies to the percentage of brain tissue a Platapus has dedicated to it's bill's electrical impulse sensory system (a lot!). There are also exellent discussions on each of the rendevous point common ancestors - the date, what they might have been like, what our linage and the one joining have in common and what evolved afterwards on the separate paths, etc. Written for the educated layperson, it can be at times a little too high level for anyone in or near the field or who craves a deeper dive into a specific topic, but all in all a wonderful read. Not as seminal as The Selfish Gene or as forceful as The Blind Watchmaker', but articulate and eye opening none the less. Dawkins still has it. Highly recommended.
