Generations

From Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary biologist extraodinaire

Imagine a contemporary human on a beach holding her mother's hand. Then picture the mother in turn holding the hand of her own mother. Then with your imagination, extend this hand-holding chain additional generations into the past. When this imagined chain of ancestors reaches about 300 miles (480km) in length (this takes 500,000 generations), it will have reached the point where the mother at the head of the line resembles the beings we call chimpanzees. Keep in mind that we started with humans, and that, of course, all the mothers and daughters are directly related to one another.

There was no single first human. Just as we cannot say for sure where yellow begins exactly on a rainbow- there is no clear point in time one's mother was a chimp-like ape whose daughter was a human.

Richard Dawkins' writings really turned my head around in thinking quite a bit. This thought on continuous small changes- is quite extraordinary. Up to the point of reading this back a decade or more ago, I never thought of it until Dr Dawkins expressed the idea so fluidly and so intuitively.

2023-01