The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life

Professor Richard Dawkins was the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position he held from 1995 until 2008, and is now Emeritus Fellow of New College, Oxford. His bestselling books include The Extended Phenotype (1982) and its sequel The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River Out of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), A Devil's Chaplain (2004), The Ancestor's Tale (2004), The God Delusion (2007), The Magic of Reality (2011), and The Genetic Book of the Dead (2024). He has won numerous literary and scientific awards, including the 1987 Royal Society of Literature Award, the 1990 Michael Faraday Award of the Royal Society, the 1994 Nakayama Prize for Human Science, the 1997 International Cosmos Prize, and the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest in 2009.

DR. YAN WONG is an evolutionary biologist who studies the theoretical underpinnings of life. His DPhil involved modeling the evolutionary effects of self-recognition systems in plants, which was followed by a number of years at the Oxford Museum of Natural History, where he first worked with the renowned biologist, Richard Dawkins. In 2009, following a lectureship in evolutionary biology and ecology at the University of Leeds, Yan became a presenter on BBC1's prime-time series "Bang Goes The Theory", which demonstrates a wide and eclectic range of scientific ideas to the public at large. He also has a regular slot answering questions on the popular Radio 4 series 'More Or Less' and is a contributor to Bacon's Theory on Radio 5 Live.