Well, it is just a collection of essays. Ancestor’s Tale will give you a bit of deja vu from time to time, because some of the “tales” (such as ring species) are tales that he’s told before in shorter essays (like those in Devils Chaplain). But most aren’t, and as a general overview of the relation of all life on earth, it’s a pretty damn good read. Instead of his more disjointed, short diatribes, it’s an extended and fascinating journey through the kingdom of life. Lots of charming detail, lots of explaining how and why scientists do certain things and know certain things. For the savvy, non-layman it might not be as exciting, but for myself it was great, even if not everything was new. What The Blind Watchmaker did for evolutionary theory, Tale does for common descent.
If you’re going to use this sort of logic, you have to explain who created the Creator.
Your post seems to assume that the “voila!” happened exactly once, and it is too much of a stretch to think that the single matriarch organism had the ability to reproduce without an intelligent creator.
Who’s to say that a “voila!” of one form or another didn’t happen billions of times over a billion years before a reproducing organism was created? A billion organisms could have been created, each one living a minute, a day or a year, but dying out unnoticed because it didn’t have that one all important skill, replication.
Exactly. I’ve never understood the type of reasoning used in the OP.
No one understands how X happened, therefore that **proves **that Y (which no one understands) caused X.